LITTLE

SCIENCE,
BIG
SCIENCE
DEREK J. DE SOLLA PRICE

COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK AND LONDON


Copyright © 1963 Columbia University Press
Columbia Paperback Edition 1965
ISBN: 0-231-08562-1
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
THE
GEORGE B. PEGRAM
LECTURES
SCIENCE PLAYS such ED important role in today’s world that
opportunities for reflective appraisals of the interaction be­
tween science and other aspects of our society should be culti­
vated. To this end the Trustees of Associated Universities, Inc.,
established the annual George B. Pegram Lectureship at Brook-
haven National Laboratory. Each lecture series is given over
a period of about two weeks during which the lecturer resides
at the Laboratory. This arrangement provides for him many
opportunities for formal and informal contacts with the staff
as well as a period of freedom from other duties.
The lectureship was named to honor George Braxton Pegram
(1877-1958), one of the most influential scientists of the nu­
clear age. He was Professor of Physics, Dean, and Vice Presi­
dent of Golumbia University. He was instrumental in seeing
that the government was aware of the potentialities of nuclear
energy in the defense of the country. In 1946 he headed the
Initiatory University Group which proposed that a regional
center for research in the nuclear sciences be estabhshed in
the New York area and thus played a key role in the estabhsh-
ment of Associated Universities, Inc., and the founding of
Brookhaven National Laboratory. He received many awards
 T H E G EO R G E B . P E G R A M L E C T U R E S
and honorary degrees, the last of which was the Karl Taylor
Compton gold medal for distinguished service in physics.
George B. Pegram’s lucid mind and gentle ways will be long
remembered by those who knew him. This series in his honor
has been established to further his conviction that the results
of science can be made to serve the needs and hopes of man­
kind. PREFACE
The previous Pegram Lecturers have been distinguished
scientists who, from their various points of view, examined
the impact of science and scientists on society. Professor
PEGRAM LECTURERS are supposcd to talk about science and
Derek J. de Solla Price of Yale University, the fourth lecturer
its place in society. The ordinary way of doing this would
in the series, is a well-known historian of science who, in a
be either to talk popular science or to adopt one of the various
sense, chose to look at the other side of the coin. His lectures,
styles in humanistic discussion of the reactions between men
given June 19-29, 1962, deal with the sociology of science
and science. Previous lecturers in this series have given ac­
itself. Applying scientific methods to an investigation of the
counts of the content of space science and made excursions
rapid growth of science, the changing role of scientific publica­
into the philosophy and the history of science. Although pro­
tions, and the evolution of scientific organizations. Dr. Price
fessionally my concern is with the history of science, I have
presents a fascinating analysis of problems which are central
a certain prehistoric past as a physicist, and this has led
in the lives of today’s scientists. His dual background as a
me to treat these lectures in what is, perhaps, an extraordinary
physicist and a historian qualifies him uniquely for the task
way.
he has set himself.
My goal is not discussion of the content of science or even
The 1962 Pegram Lectureship Committee a humanistic analysis of its relations. Rather, I want to clarify
GEORGE B . COLLINS these more usual approaches by treating separately all the
HERBERT J . KOUTS scientific analyses that may be made of science. Why should
IRVING J . POLK we not turn the tools of science on science itself? Why not
HENRY QUASTLER measure and generalize, make hypotheses, and derive con­
JA M E S S. ROBERTSON clusions?
GERHART FRiEDLANDER, Chairman In lectures emanating from so large an atomic establish­
ment as Brookhaven, it would be gratuitous to explain how
science has become a crucial and very expensive part of man’s
activity. In the course of its growth to this condition, science
 PREFACE PREFACE
has acquired a great deal of administration, organization, and things can be said about the behavior of the gas * as a whole,
politicking. These have evolved, for the most part, on an ad and it is in this way that I want to discuss the analysis of
hoc, empirical basis. Most of the time I worry that there science as a whole.
has been insufficient humanistic appraisal of the situation. According to this metaphor, my first lecture is concerned
In these lectures, I shall worry that we have not been suffi­ with the volume of science, the second with the velocity distri­
ciently scientific in analyzing a whole set of regularities that bution of its molecules, the third with the way in which the
can be dissected out before beginning to deal humanistically molecules interact with one another, and the fourth in deriving
with those irregularities that occur because men are men, the political and social properties of this gas.
and not machines.
My approach will be to deal statistically, in a not very DEREK J . DE SOLXA PRICE
mathematical fashion, with general problems of the shape and New Haven
size of science and the ground rules governing growth and November, 1962
behavior of science-in-the-large. That is to say, I shall not
• One must bear in mind that gas derives from the Greek Khaos, a
discuss any part of the detail of scientific discoveries, their perfectly general term for a chaos.
use and interrelations. I shall not even discuss specific scien­
tists. Rather, treating science as a measurable entity, I shall
attempt to develop a calculus of scientific manpower, litera­
ture, talent, and expenditure on a national and on an inter­
national scale. From such a calculus we hope to analyze what
it is that is essentially new in the present age of Big Science,
distinguishing it from the former state of Little Science.
The method to be used is similar to that of thermodynamics,
in which is discussed the behavior of a gas under various con­
ditions of temperature and pressure. One does not fix one’s
gaze on a specific molecule called George, traveling at a
specific velocity and being in a specific place at some given
instant; one considers only an average of the total assemblage
in which some molecules are faster than others, and in which
they are spaced out randomly and moving in different direc­
tions. On the basis of such an impersonal average, useful
 AC KN OW LED GM EN TS CONTENTS

PREFACE
I gratefully acknowledge the stimulus and help aflForded by
graduate students in my seminars at Yale University, the
1. PROLOGUE TO A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
work and devotion of my research assistant, Miss Joy Day,
and the intent hterary vigilance of my good friend David
2. G A LTO N R E V ISIT E D
33
Klein. Thanks are also due to Asger Aaboe for drawing many
beautiful graphs. I am further indebted to Yale University 3. IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES AND TH E AFFLUENT
Press for permission to reproduce figures from Science Since SC IE N T IFIC COM M UTER 62
Babylon which I published with them in 1962; to the McGraw-
Hill Book Company for permission to reproduce the graph on 4. P O L IT IC A L STRA TEGY FOR BIG SC IE N T IST S 92
development of accelerators from M. S. Livingston and J. P.
Blewett, Particle Accelerators; to the Addison-Wesley Publish­ IN D EX 116
ing Company for the graph on growth of cities from G. K. Zipf,
Human Behavior and the Principle of Least E§ort; and to the
Cambridge University Press for permission to use an adaption
of a figure from D’Arcy W. Thompson, Growth and Form.
 ( 1)
How big are you, baby? PROLOGUE TO
Why, don’t you know. A SCIENCE
You’re only so big. OF S C I E N C E
And there’s still room to grow.
( n u r se r y rh ym e)
DURING A M EETING at which a number of great physicists were
to give firsthand accounts of their epocli-making discoveries,
the chairman opened the proceedings with the remark: “Today
we are privileged to sit side-by-side with the giants on whose
shoulders we stand ” ^ This, in a nutshell, exemplifies the pe­
culiar immediacy of science, the recognition that so large a
proportion of everything scientific that has ever occurred
is happening now, within living memory. To put it another
way, using any reasonable definition of a scientist, we can
say that 80 to 90 percent of all the scientists that have ever
lived are alive now. Alternatively, any young scientist, starting
^ Gerald Holton, “On the recent past of physics,” American Journal of
Physics, 29 (December, 1961), 805. I should like to draw attention to
the fine study published while this work was in progress: Gerald Holton,
“ Models for Understanding the Growth and Excellence of Scientific
Research,” in S. R. Graubard and G. Holton, eds.. Excellence and
Leadership in a Democracy (New York, Columbia University Press,
1962), 94-131, first published as “Scientific research and scholarship:
notes towards the design of proper scales,” in Proceedings of the Ameri­
can Academy of Arts and Sciences, 91 (No. 2 ), 362-99 (Daedalus,
March, 1962). My work derives much from this previous publication,
though its author and 1 do not always agree in detail in the conclusions
we derive from the statistical data.
 2 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
now and looking back at the end of his career upon a normal
life span, will find that 80 to 90 percent of all scientific work
achieved by the end of the period will have taken place before
his very eyes, and that only 10 to 20 percent will antedate his
experience.
So strong and dominant a characteristic of science is this
immediacy, that one finds it at the root of many attitudes
taken by scientist and layman toward modern science. It is
what makes science seem essentially modem and contempora­
neous. As a historian of science, I find myself doing annual
battle to justify and uphold the practice of spending more
than half our time on the period before Newton, whereas
every contemporary scientist around knows that what really
counts is science since Einstein.
Because the science we have now so vastly exceeds all
that has gone before, we have obviously entered a new age
that has been swept clear of all but the basic traditions of
the old. Not only are the manifestations of modem scientific
hardware so monumental that they have been usefully com­
pared with the pyramids of Egypt and the great cathedrals of
medieval Europe, but the national expenditures of manpower
and money on it have suddenly made science a major segment
of our national economy. The large-scale character of modem
science, new and shining and all-powerful, is so apparent that
the happy term “Big Science” has been coined to describe
it.^ Big Science is so new that many of us can remember its
beginnings. Big Science is so large that many of us begin to
worry about the sheer mass of the monster we have created.
* Alvin M. Weinberg, “Impact of large-scale science on the United
States,” Science, 134 (July 21, 1961), 164. I am indebted to this paper
for many ideas. See also further comments by Weinberg in “The Federal
Laboratories and science education,” Science, 136 (April 6, 1962), 27.
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 3
Big Science is so diflFerent from the former state of affairs
that we can look back, perhaps nostalgically, at the Little
Science that was once our way of life.
If we are to understand how to live and work in the age
newly dawned, it is clearly necessary to appreciate the nature
of the transition from Little Science to Big Science. It is only
too easy to dramatize the change and see the differences
with reckless naiVet^. But how much tmth is there in the
picture of the Little Scientist as the lone, long-haired genius,
moldering in an attic or basement workshop, despised by so­
ciety as a nonconformist, existing in a state of near poverty,
motivated by the flame burning within him? And what about
the corresponding image of the Big Scientist? Is he honored
in Washington, sought after by all the research corporations
of the “Boston ring road,” part of an elite intellectual brother­
hood of co-workers, arbiters of political as well as technological
destiny? And the basis of the change—was it an urgent public
reaction to the first atomic explosion and the first national
shocks of military missiles and satellites? Did it all happen
very quickly, with historical roots no deeper in time than the
Manhattan Project, Cape Canaveral rocketry, the discovery of
penicillin, and the invention of radar and electronic computers?
I think one can give a flat “No” in answer to all these
questions. The images are too naively conceived, and the transi­
tion from Little Science to Big Science was less dramatic and
more gradual than appears at first. For one thing, it is clear
that Little Science contained many elements of the grandiose.
And, tucked away in some academic comers, modem Big
Science probably contains shoestring operations by unknown
pioneers who are starting lines of research that will be of
decisive interest by 1975. It is the brave exception rather than
4 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
the rule that key break-throughs are heralded at birth as im­
portant work done by important people.
Historically, there have been numerous big national eflPorts;
the great observatories of Ulugh Beg in Samarkand in the
fifteenth century, of Tycho Brahe on his island of Hven in the
sixteenth century, and of Jai Singh in India in the seventeenth
century, each of which absorbed sensibly large fractions of
the available resources of their nations. As international efforts,
there were the gigantic expeditions of the eighteenth century
to observe the transits of Venus. And, as large-scale hardware,
there were the huge electrical machines, produced most notably
in Holland in the eighteenth century, machines that in their
time seemed to stretch man’s scientific engineering to its ulti­
mate capability and to give him the power to manufacture the
most extreme physical forces of the universe, rivaling the very
lightning and perhaps providing keys to the nature of matter
and of life itself. In a way, our dreams for modem accelerators
pale by comparison.
But let us not be distracted by history. What shall concern
us is not so much the offering of counterexamples to show
that Little Science was sometimes big, and Big Science little,
but rather a demonstration that such change as has occurred
has been remarkably gradual. To get at this we must begin
our analysis of science by taking measurements, and in this
case it is even more diflScult than usual to make such deter­
minations and find out what they mean.
Our starting point will be the empirical statistical evidence
drawn from many numerical indicators of the various fields and
aspects of science. All of these show with impressive con­
sistency and regularity that if any suflSciently large segment
of science is measured in any reasonable way, the normal
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E &
mode of growth is exponential. That is to say, science grows
at compound interest, multiplying by some fixed amount in
equal periods of time. Mathematically, the law of exponential
growth follows from the simple condition that at any time
the rate of growth is proportional to the size of the population
or to the total magnitude already achieved—the bigger a
thing is, the faster it grows. In this respect it agrees with the
common natural law of growth governing the number of
human beings in the population of the world or of a particular
country, the number of fruit flies growing in a colony in a
bottle, or the number of miles of railroad built in the early
industrial revolution.
It might at first seem as if establishing such an empirical
law of growth for science was neither unexpected nor signifi­
cant. The law has, however, several remarkable features, and
from it a number of powerful conclusions can be drawn. In­
deed, it is so far-reaching that I have no hesitation in sug­
gesting it as the fundamental law of any analysis of science.
Its most surprising and significant feature is that, unlike
most pieces of curve-fitting, the empirical law holds true with
high accuracy over long periods of time. Even with a some­
what careless and uncritical choice of the index taken as a
measme, one has little trouble in showing that general ex­
ponential growth has been maintained for two or three cen­
turies. The law therefore, though at this stage still merely
empirical, has a status immediately more significant than the
usual short-term economic time series. This leads one to a
strong suspicion that the law is more than empirical—and
that with suitable definitions of the indices that grow expo­
nentially, one may show, as we later shall, that there is a reason­
able theoretical basis for such a law.
 KJ A b Ul KN C E OF S C I E NC E A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E /
A second important feature of the growth of science is that Important physicists
it is surprisingly rapid however it is measured. An exponential Number of chemical elements known
Accuracy of instruments
increase is best characterized by stating the time required College entrants/1000 population
for a doubling in size or for a tenfold increase.® Now, de­
pending on what one measures and how, the crude size of 15 years
science in manpower or in publications tends to double within B.A., B.Sc.
a period of 10 to 15 years. The 10-year period emerges from Scientific journals
Membership of scientific institutes
those catchall measures that do not distin^uisbJAw-gradfi..wQrk Number of chemical compounds known
from high but adopt a basic, minimal definiti^ the Number of scientific abstracts, all fields
15-year period results when one is more selective, counting
only some more stringent defijnipjgn^nf published snmntifin work 10 years
and those who produce it. If this stringency is increased so Number of asteroids known
Literature in theory of determinants
that only scientific work of uery high gnghty^ is counted, then Literature in non-Euclidean geometry
the doubhng period is drawn out so that it approaches about Literature in x rays
20^ a r s . Literature in experimental psychology
The following list shows the order of magnitudes of an as­ Number of telephones in United States
Number of engineers in United States
sortment of measurable and estimatable doubling times and Speed of transportation
shows how rapidly the growth of science and technology has Kilowatt-hours of electricity
been outstripping that of the size of the population and of
our nonscientific institutions. 5 years
Number of overseas telephone calls
100 years Magnetic permeability of iron
Entries in dictionaries of national biography 1 Y2 years
50 years Million electron volts of accelerators
L abor force
Population Bearing in mind the long period of validity of exponential
Num ber of universities growth, let us note that a 15-year doubling time extended over
20 years three centuries of growth corresponds to an increase of 20
Gross National Product powers of two, or a factor of about one million. Thus, in the
Important discoveries interval from 1660 to the present day, such indices of the size
®It is easy enough to convert from one to the other by noting, as a of science should have increased by the order of a million. To
rough approximation, that 10 doubling periods correspond to a factor
of 1024, or about 3 tenfolding periods. offer the soundest explanation of the scientific and industrial
8 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
revolutions is to posit that this is indeed what has been hap­
pening.
Just after 1660, the first national scientific societies in the
modem tradition were founded; they established the first
scientific periodicals, and scientists found themselves begin­
ning to write scientific papers instead of the books that hitherto
had been their only outlets. We have now a world list of some
50.000 scientific periodicals (Fig. 1) that have been founded,
of which about 30,000 are still being published; these have
produced a world total of about six million scientific papers
(Fig. 2) and an increase at the approximate rate of at least
half a million a year.^ In general, the same applies to scientific
manpower. Whereas in the mid-seventeenth century there were
a few scientific men—a denumerable few who were countable
and namable—there is now in the United States alone a popula­
tion on the order of a million with scientific and technical de­
grees (Fig. 3). What is more, the same exponential law ac­
counts quite well for all the time in between. The present
million came through intermediate stages of 100,000 in 1900,
10.000 in 1850, and 1000 in 1800. In terms of magnitude
alone, the transition from Little Science to Big Science has
been steady—or at least has had only minor periodic fluctua­ Fig. 1. TOTAL NUM BER OF SCIEN TIFIC JO URN ALS AND ABSTRACT
tions similar to those of the stock market—and it has fol­ JO U RN ALS FOUNDED, AS A FUNCTION O F DATE
lowed a law of exponential growth with the time rates pre­
Note that abstracts begin when the population of journals is approxi­
viously stated. mately 300. Numbers recorded here are for journals founded, rather than
Thus, the steady doubling every 15 years or so that has those surviving; for all periodicals containing any “science” rather than
for “strictly scientific” journals. Tighter definitions might reduce the
brought us into the present scientific age has produced the absolute numbers by an order of magnitude, but the general trend re­
peculiar immediacy that enables us to say that so much of mains constant for all definitions. From Derek J. de Sofia Price, Science
Since Babylon (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961).
*F or a more detailed discussion of this see Derek J. de Sofia Price,
Science Since Babylon (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961), Chap­
ter 5.

It will be noted that after an initial period of rapid expansion to a stable
growth rate, the number of abstracts increases exponentially, doubling
in approximately 15 years.
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E li
science is current and that so many of its practitioners are
alive. If we start with the law that the number of living scien­
tists doubles in, let us say, 15 years, then in any interval of
15 years there will come into being as many scientists again
as in the whole of time preceding. But at any moment there
coexists a body of scientists produced not over 15 years but
over an interval nearer to the 45 years separating average
date of arrival at the research front from average date of re­
tirement from active scientific work. Thus, for every one per­
son bom before such a period of 45 years, we now have one
bom in the first doubling period, two in the second, and four
in the third. There are, then, about seven scientists alive for
every eight that have ever been, a fraction of 8 7 ^ percent;
let us call this a coefficient of immediacy. One may calculate
this exactly by using actuarial mortality tables, but in fact
the result is not much altered by this because the doubling
period of science is so much less than the average working
life of a scientist.
For a doubling period of 10 years, the corresponding co­
efficient of immediacy is about 96 percent; for a doubling time
of 20 years, about 81 percent. Thus, even if one admits only
the general form of the growth function and the order of
magnitude of its time constant, these account for the feeling
that most of the great scientists are stiU with us, and that the
greater part of scientific work has been produced within living
memory, within the span of the present generation of scientists.
Furthermore, one can emphasize the principle by remarking
that some time between the next decade and the one after we
shall have produced as much scientific work and as many
scientists as in the whole of time up to the present.
What we have said so far is by now well known and reason-

POPULATION IN TH E UNITED STATES
It may be seen that the more highly qualified the manpower, the greater
has been its growth rate. It will also be noted that there appears a
distinct tendency for the curves to turn toward a ceiling value running
parallel with the population curve.
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 13
ably well agreed upon by those who speculate about science
for fun or high policy. I should like to extend these results,
however, in a couple of ways that may suggest that this out­
look requires revision. In the first place, speaking in terms of
a "coefiicient of immediacy” can be misleading. Let us com­
pare the figures just found with the conjectural figures for
world population.
At the beginning of the Christian Era, the human race
numbered about 250 million; it grew slowly and erratically,
differently in different places and at different times, and
reached a figure of 550 million by the mid-seventeenth cen­
tury. It has grown at an ever-increasing pace, so that today
there are about 3000 million people, and it looks as though
that number will double every 40 to 50 years. If we reckon
about 20 years to a generation, there must have been at least
60,000 millions of people, and thus only about 5 percent of
those who have lived since the beginning of our era are alive
now. If we count all those who lived before the time of Christ,
the fraction will be smaller; if we count only those who have
lived since the mid-seventeenth century, it will be a little
more than 10 percent. Making due allowance for changing
mortalities and age of child-bearing will not, I feel, materially
alter the qualitative result that the human population is far
from immediate in the sense that science is.
Even if we accept the gloomy prognostications of those
who talk about the admittedly serious problem of the popula­
tion explosion, it would apparently take about another half-
century—some time after the year 2000—^before we could
claim that 50 percent of all the human beings that have lived
were at that moment alive. Most of the persons that have
ever lived are dead, and, in the sense that this will continue
14 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
to be so, they will stay dead. One might conclude, since the
rate of growth of entries in the great dictionaries of national
biographies shows a fairly constant proportion to the popula­
tion at various dates, that most of the great or worthy persons
of the world are dead. That is why history is a subject rather
different from history of science. There is much more past
to live in if you discuss politics and wars than if you discuss
science.
The immediacy of science needs a comparison of this sort
before one can realize that it implies an explosion of science
dwarfing that of the population, and indeed all other explo­
sions of nonscientific human growth. Roughly speaking, every
doubling of the population has produced at least three dou­
blings of the number of scientists, so that the size of science
is eight times what it was and the number of scientists per
million population has multiplied by four. Mankind’s per capita
involvement with science has thus been growing much more
rapidly than the population.
A second clarification, one of crucial importance, must be
made concerning the immediacy and growth of modem science.
We have already shown that the 80- to 90-percent currency of
modem science is a direct result of an exponential growth that
has been steady and consistent for a long time. It follows that
this result, true now, must also have been true at all times
in the past, back to the eighteenth century and perhaps even
as far back as the late seventeenth. In 1900, in 1800, and per­
haps in 1700, one could look back and say that most of the
scientists that have ever been are ahve now, and most of what
is known has been determined within hving memory. In that
respect, surprised though we may be to find it so, the scientific
world is no different now from what it has always been since
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 15
the seventeenth century. Science has always been modern; it
has always been exploding into the population, always on the
brink of its expansive revolution. Scientists have always felt
themselves to be awash in a sea of scientific literature that
augments in each decade as much as in all times before.
It is not difficult to find good historical authority for this
feeling in all epochs. In the nineteenth century we have
Charles Babbage in England and Nathaniel Bowditch in the
United States bitterly deploring the lack of recognition of the
new scientific era that had just burst upon them. In the eight­
eenth century there were the first furtive moves toward special
journals and abstracts in a vain attempt to halt or at least
rationalize the rising tide of publications; there is Sir Hum­
phrey Davy, whose habit it was to throw books away after
reading on the principle that no man could ever have the
time or occasion to read the same thing twice. Even in the
seventeenth century, we must not forget that the motivating
purpose of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and the Journal des Sgavans was not the publishing of new
scientific papers so much as the monitoring and digesting of
the learned publications and letters that now were too much
for one man to cope with in his daily reading and corre­
spondence.^
The principle of more than 80 percent being contempora­
neous is clearly sufficient to cast out any naive idea that sheer
change in scale has led us from Little Science to Big Science.
If we are to distinguish the present phase as something new,
something different from the perception of a burgeoning science
®An excellent historical account of the birth of scientific journals is
given by David A. Kronick, A History of Scientific and Technical Periodi­
cals (New York, Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1962).
16 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
that was common to Maxwell, to Franklin, and to Newton,
then we cannot rest our case on the rate of growth alone. A
science that has advanced steadily through more than five
orders of magnitude in more than 250 years is not going to be
upset by a mere additional single order of magnitude such
as we have experienced within the last few decades of the
present century.
As a side point one may note that the constancy of this
phenomenon of immediacy is typical of many other constancies
in science that make it meaningful and useful to pursue the
history of science even though most of our past is alive. What
we must do in the humanistic and the scientific analyses of
science is search out such constancies of scientific method, of
public reaction, of the use of matheniatical models or euphoric
hardware or the groimd rules of manpower and motivation,
and apply them to our criticism and understanding of this
science that seems so essentially modem and out of all rela­
tion to Archimedes or Galileo or Boyle or Benjamin Franklin.
If we honor a Boyle for his law, or a Planck for his constant,
this is largely accidental hero worship; more important to
us than the names of those who have quarried a slab of im­
mortality is their having done so in a manner which notably
illustrates the constant and seemingly eternal way in which
these things have been going on. To take an early example
such as GaHleo, seen in all its historical perspective, is in
many ways more eflBcient than choosing a recent example such
as Oppenheimer, though Galileo can tell us nothing of the
content of modem atomic physics as can Oppenheimer.
To return to our main point, if the sheer growth of science
in its exponential climb is not admissible as an explanation
for the transition from Little Science to Big Science, we are
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 17
left in a quandary. To escape from it one may be tempted at
first to deny that there has been any such radical transforma­
tion of the state of science. This is amply belied by the fact
that since World War II we have been worried about ques­
tions of scientific manpower and literature, government spend­
ing, and military power in ways that seem quite different, not
merely in scale, from all that went before.
Even if one admits that new things are happening and that
Big Science differs not merely in scale from Little Science,
one might still maintain that it was the cataclysmic changes
associated with World War II that initiated us into the new
era and produced all the major changes. Quite unexpectedly,
one can show from the statistical studies we have been using
to measure the pure growth that the influence of the war on
scientific manpower and literature seems only to have been
the production of a temporary perturbation that extended for
its duration.
For this interval it is not possible to use the indices one
might use before or after; manpower may be in military service,
publication may be suppressed for secrecy. Yet it is apparent
that the exponential increase after the war is identical with
that before (Fig. 4 ). This is a strong result, for it shows that
the percentage increase per annum is the same before and
after the war and, therefore, if there is any constancy about
the way in which scientific papers generate new scientific
papers and researchers generate new classes of researchers,
there cannot have been any great loss or gain to science during
the war. With the exception only of a sidewise displacement
of the curve due to secrecy loss, science is just where it would
have been, statistically speaking, and is growing at the same
rate as if there had been no war. The order of events might
 1 8 A S C IE N C E O F S C IE N C E
have been dijBFerent, the pohtical implications perhaps grossly
so, but there is some reason for taking a fatalistic line that
it was in the nature of things for accelerator laboratories to
grow as large as Brookhaven, and missile establishments as
large as Cape Canaveral, and that had there been no Man­
hattan Project there might still have been a Sputnik. The
Thousands of “Physics Abstracts" since 1900
Fig. 4. TOTAL NUM BER OF PHYSICS ABSTRACTS PUBLISHED SINCE
JANUARY 1, 1900
The full curve gives the total, and the broken curve represents the ex­
ponential approximation. Parallel curves are drawn to enable the effect
of the wars to be illustrated. From Derek J. de SoUa Price, Science Since
Babylon (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961).
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 19
war looms as a huge milepost, but it stands at the side of a
straight road of exponential growth.
If, then, we are to analyze the peculiarities of Big Science,
we must search for whatever there is other than the steady
hand-in-hand climb of all the indices of science through suc­
cessive orders of magnitude. There are, I propose, two quite
different types of general statistical phenomena of science-in-
the-large. On the one hand, although we have the over-all
picture of a steady exponential growth with this amazingly
short time constant of about 15 years, not all things are grow­
ing at precisely this rate; some are faster, others slower, though
all of them outpace the growth of the population. On the
other hand, we have the possibility that the exponential law
of growth may be beginning to break down.
It is just possible that the tradition of more than 250 years
represents a sort of adolescent stage during which every half-
century science grew out of its order of magnitude, donned
a new suit of clothes, and was ready to expand again. Per­
haps now a post-adolescent quiescence has set in, and such
exuberant growth has slowed down and is about to stop upon
the attainment of adult stature. After all, five orders of magni­
tude is rather a lot. Scientists and engineers are now a couple
of percent of the labor force of the United States, and the
annual expenditure on research and development is about
the same fraction of the Gross National Product. It is clear
that we cannot go up another two orders of magnitude as we
have climbed the last five. If we did, we should have two
scientists for every man, woman, child, and dog in the popula­
tion, and we should spend on them twice as much money as
we had. Scientific doomsday is therefore less than a century
distant.
At a later point I shall treat separately the problem of
20 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 21
growths at rates diflFerent from that of basic exponential in­ not go in its accustomed fashion (Fig. 5). In its typical pattern,
crease. We shall consider such growths as slowly changing growth starts exponentially and maintains this pace to a point
statistical distributions of the indices rather than as separate almost halfway between floor and ceiling, where it has an in­
rates of increase. Thus, for example, if the number of science flection. After this, the pace of growth declines so that the curve
Ph.D’s were doubling every 15 years, and the number of good continues toward the ceiling in a manner symmetrical with the
ones only every 20 years, the quota of Ph.D’s per good physicist way in which it climbed from the floor to the midpoint. This
would be doubling only every 60 years, a change so slow that symmetry is an interesting property; rarely in nature does one
we can count it out of the scientific explosion. I shall show also,
from the statistical distribution, that it is reasonable on the­
oretical grounds to suppose that the doubling time of one
measure might be a multiple of the period for some other index.
This treatment, however, requires a closer look at what is ac­
tually being measured and must be deferred until further re­
sults have been achieved from the study of the crude shape of
exponential growth.
Moreover, the “normal” law of growth that we have been con­
sidering thus far describes, in fact, a most abnormal state of
events. In the real world things do not grow and grow until they
reach infinity. Rather, exponential growth eventually reaches
some limit, at which the process must slacken and stop before
reaching absurdity. This more realistic function is also well
From Derek J. de Sofia Price, Science Since Babylon (New Haven, Yale
known as the logistic curve, and it exists in several slightly University Press, 1961).
different mathematical forms. Again, at this stage of ignorance
of science in analysis, we are not particularly concerned with find asymmetrical logistic curves that use up one more param­
the detailed mathematics or precise formulation of measure­ eter to describe them. Nature appears to be parsimonious with
ments. For the first approximation (or, more accurately, the her parameters of growth.
zeroth-order approximation) let it suflBce to consider the gen­ Because of the symmetry so often found in the logistic curves
eral trend of the growth. that describe the growth of organisms, natural and manmade,
The logistic curve is limited by a floor—that is, by the base measuring science or measuring the number of fruit flies in a
value of the index of growth, usually zero—and by a ceiling, bottle, the width of the curve can be simply defined. Mathe­
which is the ultimate value of the growth beyond which it can­ matically, of course, the curve extends to infinity in both direc­
22 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
tions along the time axis. For convenience we measure the
width of the midregion cut off by the tangent at the point of
inflection, a quantity corresponding to the distance between the
quartiles on a standard curve of error or its integral. This mid­
region may be shown necessarily to extend on either side of
the center for a distance equal to about three of the doubling
periods of the exponential growth.
Thus, for example, if we have a beanstalk that doubles in
height every day, there will exist a midperiod of about six days
during which the beanstalk will leave its juvenile exponential
growth and settle down to an adult life of stability in length
(Fig. 6). The only question is one of how much free and ex­
ponential growth is allowed before the decelerative period sets
in. For the beanstalk, the midpoint of growth occurs only about
Fig. 6. GROWTH IN LENGTH OF A BEANSTALK AS A
FUNCTION OF AGE
Adapted from D’Arcy W. Thompson, Growth and Form (Cambridge,
England, Cambridge University Press, 1948), p. 116, Fig. 20.
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 23
four days after the onset of the process, so that there is but one
day of relatively free growth, and final length is attained after
seven days. Note that the analysis involved no knowledge about
the height of the curve from floor to ceiling. True, we made a
statement about the date of the midpoint—it occurred after
four days of growth—but we could equally well have noted
that the exponential growth, short-lived in this case, extends
only for the first day, and from this it would follow that three
more doublings must bring it to the midpoint, and a further
three to senescence.
Now, with no stronger assumption than has been made about
the previously regular exponential growth with a doubling
period of 10 to 15 years, we may deduce, as we have, that the
existence of a ceiling is plausible since we should otherwise
reach absurd conditions at the end of another century. Given
the existence of such a limit, we must conclude that our ex­
ponential growth is merely the beginning of a logistic curve
in other guise. Moreover, it is seen that as soon as one enters
the midregion near the inflection—that period of secession from
accustomed conditions of exponential growth—^then another 30
to 45 years will elapse before the exact midpoint between floor
and ceiling is reached. An equal period thereafter, the curve
will effectively have reached its limit. Thus, without reference
to the present state of affairs or any estimate of just when and
where the ceiling is to be imposed, it is apparent that over a
period of one human generation science will suffer a loss of its
traditional exponential growth and approach the critical point
marking its senile limit.
However, growths that have long been exponential seem not
to relish the idea of being flattened. Before they reach a mid­
point they begin to twist and turn, and, like impish spirits,
change their shapes and definitions so as not to be exterminated
24 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
against that terrible ceiling (Fig. 7). Or, in less anthropomor­
phic terms, the cybernetic phenomenon of hunting sets in and
the curve begins to oscillate wildly. The newly felt constriction
produces restorative reaction, but the restored growth first
wildly overshoots the mark and then plunges to greater depths
than before. If the reaction is successful, its value usually seems
to lie in so transforming what is being measured that it takes
a new lease on Hfe and rises with a new vigor until, at last, it
must meet its doom.
lo ^seiCCaUoK CcKverffgfd osciCltUiofo
Fig. 7. WAYS IN WHICH LOGISTIC GROWTH MAY
REACT TO CEILING CONDITIONS
In escalation, new logistics are bom as the old ones die, in loss of
definition it becomes impossible to continue to measure the variable
in the same way or in the same units, and in oscillation ( convergent and
divergent) cybernetic forces attempt to restore free growth.
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 25
One therefore finds two variants of the traditional logistic
curve that are more frequent than the plain S-shaped ogive.
In both cases the variant sets in some time during the inflection,
presumably at a time when the privations of the loss of exponen­
tial growth become unbearable. If a slight change of definition
of the thing that is being measured can be so allowed as to count
a new phenomenon on equal terms with the old, the new logis­
tic curve rises phoenixlike on the ashes of the old, a phenome­
non first adequately recognized by Holton and felicitously
called by him “escalation.” Alternatively, if the changed
conditions do not admit a new exponential growth, there will be
violent fluctuations persisting until the statistic becomes so ill-
defined as to be uncountable, or in some cases the fluctuations
decline logarithmically to a stable maximum. At times death
may even follow this attainment of maturity, so that instead of
a stable maximum there is a slow decline back to zero, or a
sudden change of definition making it impossible to measure
the index and terminating the curve abruptly in midair.
Logistic curves such as these have become well known in
numerous analyses of historical time-series, especially those
concerning the growth of science and technology. The plain
curve is well illustrated in the birth and death of railroad track
mileage; in this case the maximum is followed by an eventual
decline as tracks are tom up and lines closed down. The curve
followed by hunting fluctuations appears in the flgures for the
production of such technological raw materials as coal and
metals (Fig. 8).® The escalated curves are probably the most
common and can be seen in the number of universities founded;
the separate steps here beautifully reflect the different tradi-
• S. G. Lasky, “Mineral industry futures can be predicted,” Engineering
and Mining Journal, 152 (August, 1951), 60; 156 (September, 1955), 94.

Fig. 8. LCXJISTIC GROWTH O F RAW M ATERIAL PRODUCTION,
SHOWING OSCILLATION ON ATTAINING CEILING CONDITIONS
Adapted from S. G. Lasky, “Mineral industry futures can be predicted,*
Engineering and Mining Journal, 156 (September, 1955).
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 27
tions of the medieval universities and the Renaissance founda­
tions (Fig. 9).
They can be seen again in the now-famihar graph, first pre­
sented humorously by Fermi,^ showing the power of acceler-
Numbcr of
Fig. 9. NUM BER OF UNIVERSITIES FOUNDED IN EUROPE
From the foundation at Cairo in 950 up to ca. 1460 there is pure ex­
ponential growth, doubling in about 100 years. Thereafter saturation
sets in, so that the midregion of the sigmoid extends from 1300 to
ca. 1610. Between 1460 and 1610 is a period of transition to the new
form of universities, a growth that also proceeds exponentially as if it
had started from unity ca. 1450 and doubling every 66 years. There is
probably an ever-greater transition to yet faster growth starting at the
end of the Industrial Revolution. From Derek J. de Solla Price, Science
Since Babylon (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961).
’ The exponential growth of accelerators was first noted by John P.
Blewett in an Internal Report of the Cosmotron Department of Brook-
haven National Laboratory, written on June 9, 1950. The first public
presentation of this material was made by Fermi in his address as retir­
ing President, at the American Physical Society meeting in January, 1954.
Figure 10 is a later version from M. S. Livingston and J. P. Blewett,
Particle Accelerators (New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.,
1962), p. 6.
 )0-

0 ------------------
/ i
® ; A It /

/ i
0 ::----------------- >

3:
4 c _ .

—
/ /
/
/ '*
/
;
A

-A

/< /'
— 1

'A : /
/
r
/ I

V ji
■ 1.11.1 - L .J l,.l . - 1 . 1 .1 .J _ i _L_1. I 1 . 1 1 11 1- » ■ 1
Fig. 11. NUM BER OF CHEM ICAL ELEM EN TS KNOWN
AS A FUNCTION OF DATE
Fig. 10. THE RATE OF INCREASE OF OPERATING ENERGY
After the work of Davy there is a clear logistic decline followed by a
IN PARTICLE ACCELERATORS
set of escalations corresponding to the discovery of elements by tech­
niques that are predominantly physical. Around 1950 is the latest es­
From M. S. Livingston and J. P. Blewett, Particle Accelerators (New
calation produced by the manufacture of trans-uranic elements.
York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1962), p. 6, Fig. 1.1, used by
permission.
 30 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
ators (Fig. 10). It becomes less and less humorous as it goes on
faithfully predicting when yet another major advance in method
is needed to produce another step in the escalation. Yet, again,
escalations can be seen in the curve showing the number of
chemical elements known as a function of date (Fig. 11).
Omitting the jfirst ten, which were known to prehistoric man,
we have a steady exponential growth, doubling a shade more
rapidly than every 20 years, followed by a midpoint in about
1807 when Sir Humphrey Davy had his heyday, then a period
of decline when the first 60 elements had been found. By the
end of the nineteenth century, when new methods, physical
rather than chemical, led to new classes of elements, there ap­
peared a new bunch of ogives, then a halt until the big ma­
chines enabled man to create the last batch of highly unstable
and short-lived trans-uranic elements.
From this we are led to suggest a second basic law of the
analysis of science; all the apparently exponential laws of
growth must ultimately be logistic, and this implies a period of
crisis extending on either side of the date of midpoint for about
a generation. The outcome of the battle at the point of no return
is complete reorganization or violent fluctuation or death of
the variable.
Now that we know something about the pathological after­
life of a logistic curve, and that such things occur in practice in
several special branches of science and technology, let us re­
open the question of the growth curve of science as a whole. We
have seen that it has had an extraordinarily long life of purely
exponential growth and that at some time this must begin to
break down and be followed by a generation-long interval of in­
creasing restraint which may tauten its sinews for a jump either
toward escalation or toward violent fluctuation. The detailed
A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E 31
nature of this change, and any interpretation of it, must depend
on what we are measuring and on how such an index is com­
piled.
Even without such definition and analysis one can immedi­
ately deduce various characteristics of such a period. Clearly
there will be rapidly increasing concern over those problems of
manpower, literature, and expenditure, that demand solution
by reorganization. Further, such changes as are successful will
lead to a fresh escalation of rapid adaptation and growth.
Changes not efiBcient or radical enough to cause such an off­
shoot will lead to a hunting, producing violent fluctuations that
will perhaps smooth out at last.
Such an analysis seems to imply that the state called Big Sci­
ence actually marks the onset of those new conditions that will
break the tradition of centuries and give rise to new escalations,
violent huntings, redefinitions of our basic terms, and all the
other phenomena associated with the upper limit. I will suggest
that at some time, undetermined as yet but probably during the
1940s or 1950s, we passed through the midperiod in general
logistic growth of science’s body politic.
Thus, although we recognize from our discussion so far that
saturation is ultimately inevitable, it is far too approximate to
indicate when and in what circumstances saturation will begin.
We now maintain that it may already have arrived. It may seem
odd to suggest this when we have used only a few percent of
the manpower and money of the country, but in the next chap­
ter it will appear that this few percent actually represents an
approach to saturation and an exhausting of our resources that
nearly (within a factor of two) scrapes the bottom of the barrel.
At all events, the appearance of new phenomena in the in­
volvement of science with society seems to indicate something
32 A SC IE N C E OF SC IE N C E
radically different from the steady growth characteristic of the
entire historic past. The new era shows all the familiar syn­
dromes of saturation. This, I must add, is a counsel of hope
rather than despair. Saturation seldom implies death, but rather
that we have the beginning of new and exciting tactics for sci­
ence, operating with quite new ground rules.
It is, however, a grave business, for Big Sci^ c e inteqireted-
tlius becomes an uncomfortably brief interlude between the
traditional centuries of Little Science and the impending period
following transition. If we expect to discourse in scientific style
about science, and to plan accordingly, we shall have to call this
approaching period New Science, or Stable Saturation; if we
have no such hopes, we must call it senility.
(2)
GALTON
REV ISI TED
FRANCIS GALTON (1822-1911), grandson of Erasmus Darwin,
was one of the most versatile and curious minds of the nine­
teenth century. He brought fingerprinting to Scotland Yard,
founded the Eugenic Society which advocated breeding of the
human race on rational principles, and, above all, gave a flying
start to the science of mathematical genetics. His passion was
to count everything and reduce it to statistics. Those who see
the social sciences rising on a solid foundation of quantified
measurements and mathematical theory might wefl take him as
a patron saint rather than Sir William Petty, who is usually seen
as the first to bring numbers into the study of people by ana­
lyzing the bills of mortality in the seventeenth century.
Galton’s passion shows itself best, I feel, in two essays that
may seem more frivolous to us than they did to him. In the first,
he computed the additional years of life enjoyed by the Royal
Family and the clergy because of the prayers offered up for
them by the greater part of the population; the result was a neg­
ative number. In the second, to relieve the tedium of sitting for
a portrait painter, on two different occasions he computed the
number of brush strokes and found about 20,000 to the portrait;
 34 GALTON R E V ISIT E D
just the same number, he calculated, as the hand movements
that went into the knitting of a pair of socks.^
Let it not be thought that Galton was some sort of crank. His
serious work was of the highest standards of scholarship and
importance, but he is now increasingly neglected because, al­
though his researches were founded on the exciting and valid
basis of Darwin s theory of evolution, Galton had missed the
true mechanism of genetic action, discovered by his exact con­
temporary, Mendel. Mendel published his findings just five
years before Galton's book on hereditary genius,^ but was not
discovered by the outside world until Galton was nearly 80.
We shall examine his book Hereditary Genius, and, with par­
ticular attention, his special study, English Men of Science
(London, 1874). In these works Galton is primarily concerned
with his thesis that great men, including creative scientists, tend
to be related and that therefore a series of elite families con­
tributed perhaps the majority of distinguished statesmen, sci­
entists, poets, judges, and military commanders, of his day and
of the past. His main work is full of pitfalls, and currently we
are not concerned so much with the Galtonian approach to
genetics as we are with several of his interesting side investiga­
tions. These are his pioneer studies of the distribution of quality
among distinguished scientists, and a set of summaries that we
should nowadays call sociological and psychological, telling us
something about the characteristics of these exceptional men.
We intend to review these two main lines in the light of the
twentieth century and its extensions of Gabon’s work. The first,
* Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton ( New
York, Cambridge University Press, 1914-30), see especially Vol. Ilia,
p. 125.
* Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (London, 1869; reprinted by
Meridian Books, 1962),
GALTON R E V ISIT E D 35
telling us how many men or scientific papers or pieces of re­
search there are at each of several levels of quality, is necessary
if we are to understand the natmre of scientific quality, and this
knowledge is a prerequisite to the interpretation of the several
different index measures previously mentioned in connection
with the basic laws governing the exponential and logistic rates
of growth of science. The second will help us formulate ground
rules for what to expect of scientists when the change of condi­
tions produced by Big Science or Saturation Science alters their
circumstances from those they had known in past ages.
Galton began by estimating how rare in the England of his
day were various types of men who were engaged in human
affairs generally and in science particularly and who were of
sundry degrees of eminence. Using the criterion that a man was
eminent if his name appeared in a short biographical compila­
tion of 2500 Men of the Time that had just been published, or
in the select columns of obituary notices in The Times, he found
that such noteworthiness had an incidence of about one person
for every 2000 adult males or one person in 20,000 of the general
population—a mere handful alive at any time in the country.
For eminent scientists he set a standard which demanded
that they should be not merely Fellows of the Royal Society—a
meaningful honor since the reforms of election under Mr. Jus­
tice Groves some 30 years before—^but that they must be further
distinguished by a university chair; by a medal presented by a
learned society, or an office held in such a body; or by member­
ship in some elite scientific club of academic worth. His count
of people from whom he could obtain the full biographical in­
formation desired was 180, and he estimated that in the entire
country there might be at the most 300 such people.
Reckoning that half of them were between the ages of 50
 36 G ALTO N R E V ISIT E D
and 65, he calculated that the chance of rising to such stature
was about 1 in 10,000 adult males of this age group, a figure
roughly corresponding to 1 in 100,000 of the general popula­
tion. However, since the general biographical lists show that
only about 1 in 10 eminent men was engaged in science or medi­
cine, then by his previous standards there should only have
been about one eminent scientist for every 200,000 of the gen­
eral population. The fact that Galton supposes there to have
been twice as many, means either that he was erring on the side
of generosity in estimating the numbers of good scientists who
should have been on his list and were not, or that the tendency
is to cast a broader net when looking for great scientists than
when looking for great men in general.
The utility of this investigation is that it provides an estimate
of the number of scientific persons whom Galton considered
important enough to be well worth discussion, but without
limiting the scope to include such a small group that it would
leave the investigator generalizing about a mere handful of
geniuses. Thus, between 5 and 10 persons in a million fall within
this category. How does this compare with the state of affairs
since Galton s time?
Fortunately there is an admirable biographical compilation,
American Men of Science, that has run through 10 editions
between 1903 and 1960. The editor, J. McKeen Cattell (himself
a prominent psychologist), rendered signal service by starring
the most noteworthy names, beginning with an original 1000
and adding to this number as each new edition appeared.^ It
so happens that in the first edition there are about 11 starred
* Here and later we have made considerable use of the extensive analy­
sis in S. S. Visher, Scientists Starred 1903-1943 in “American Men of
Science," (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1947).
GALTON R E V ISIT E D 37
names to a million population of the United States, in the vol­
ume for 1938 there are about 12.4 to a million, and that both
figures are of the same order of magnitude as that found by
Galton. Certainly there appears to have been no vast change in
the number of “eminent” men of science to a million population,
either on moving our scene of inquiry from Britain to the
United States or on following it through nearly a doubling of
the United States population. One may argue that Galtons
standard of distinction is not the same as Cattell’s. One may
maintain with even greater reason that Cattell’s arbitrary allo­
cation of a set quota of 1000 stars originally, with a fixed incre­
ment thereafter, was perhaps out of all proportion to a constant
standard of eminence. In spite of this, we can find no rapid
changes in this estimated incidence of scientific eminence.
If in studying American Men of Science we look not at the
starred names alone but at all of them, we observe a most
strildng change in order of magnitude with the passing of time
( Table 1). Just to run one’s eye along the set of 10 editions on
a shelf is to feel an immediate respect for the power of exponen­
tial growth.
It is apparent that within the past 50 years there has been a
sixteenfold increase in the number of men, an exponential
growth with a doubling period of about 1234 years, a figure
already suggested as typifying the growth of science. Even in
relation to the size of the general population it can be seen that
the same half-century has multiplied the density of scientists by
a factor of eight, a doubling in about 17 years. Another four
such half-centuries of regular growth would give us more than
two million American men of science per million population,
if it were not that exponential growths inevitably become logis­
tic and die.
 3 8 G A LT O N R E V IS IT E D GALTON R E V ISIT E D 39
We have already shown that because of this logistic ma­ ard extent. The same problem is encountered in most recent
chinery the prospect for the immediate future is more interest­ evaluations of the high-talent population on the basis of intelli­
ing than that of a slow death from suffocation in a .d . 2160. Our gence tests. For example, one may say that on an AGCT (Army
crisis seems to be but a few decades ahead, and far more in­ General Classification Test) type of test only one man in 10,000
volved with the nature of the growth than with the final ex­ of his age group might score more than 170, one in 100,000 more
haustion of the population. It is therefore a matter of some than 180, one in 1,000,000 more than 190, and so on, with an or­
interest to seek the reason why, in spite of this general rapid der of magnitude for each 10 (more accurately, 11) points that
raise the stakes. But one cannot usefully say that eminence be­
TABLE 1 gins at a score of 172 and not below. Even if genius were merely
NUMBER OF MEN CITED IN EDITIONS OF a matter of the talents being measured by the test in hand,
AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE there would be no clear cutoff, only a gradual falling off of the
population as the standards are raised. The fault lies not so
Year of publication Number of men population much in the definition of what constitutes scientific ability as
1903 4,000 50 in the false premise that distinction or genius can be decided
1910 5,500 60
1921 on a yes-or-no-basis.
9,500 90
1928 13,500 Results more accurate, although not much more, can be
110
1933 22,000 175 achieved by taking a reasonably small group of tabulated men,
1938 28,000 220 discoveries, or even scientific institutions, journals, and coun­
1944 34,000 240
1948 tries, and carefully marking in some special way those that were
50,000 340
1955 74,000 440 distinguished. For eminent men, for example, one might use as
1960 (omitting social 96,000 480 criteria selection to give invited papers, and to receive medals
sciences) and other awards, such as Nobel Prizes. This gives the usual
sort of exponential growth, but with a doubling time consider­
exponential growth of scientific manpower—and, incidentally, ably longer than 10 years. For example, in a select, apparently
of its publications and budgets—the number of truly great men superior group of modern scientists in any large field, drawn
does not seem to change with the same quick exuberance. from standard biographical handbooks or other sources that
The root of the trouble, as Galton well perceived, lies in the select only a small elite, the doubling time is about 20 years.
establishment of any objective standard of eminence not de­ One obtains about the same figure for any list of selected great
pendent upon time. Conceivably, all that we have said is that scientific discoveries.
when men are chosen by degrees of selectivity that run to To improve the strength and significance of this result, it is
orders of 10 in a million they become remarkable to this stand­ clearly necessary to make some statement about degrees of
 40 GALTON R E V ISIT E D
eminence that would give not a dichotomy of distinguished and
undistinguished but rather a sliding scale, a sort of velocity dis­
tribution. One such scale—the traditional one used by deans
and other employers as a measure of scientific success—^is the
number of publications produced by each man in accepted
scientific journals. Let it be freely admitted at the outset that
this is a bad scale. Who dares to balance one paper of Einstein
on relativity against even a hundred papers by John Doe,
Ph.D., on the elastic constant of the various timbers (one to a
paper) of the forests of Lower Basutoland?
The scale is bad if for no other reason than that its existence
has moved people to publish merely because this is how they
may be judged. Nevertheless, it makes a starting point, and
later on it may be refined to meet objections. We shall show, for
example, that all such distributions are of the same type and,
thus, though one cannot directly measure “scientific ability,”
one may reasonably deduce properties of its presumed distribu­
tion. We shall also have to enter the caveat that the scale may
not be directly applicable to the era of Big Science, which has
involved so much collaborative work that one cannot easily de­
termine a man’s score. This is another point to be reserved for
later elaboration.
Let us not begin with too pessimistic an outlook on the worth
of this investigation. Flagrant violations there may be, but on
the whole there is, whether we like it or not, a reasonably good
correlation between the eminence of a scientist and his pro­
ductivity of papers. It takes persistence and perseverance to be
a good scientist, and these are frequently reflected in a sus­
tained production of scholarly writing. Then, again, it may be
well demonstrated that the list of high scorers contains a large
proportion of names that are not only well known but even
G A LTO N R E V ISIT E D 41
honored. Conversely, the low-scoring end of the list contains
fewer such names in terms of absolute numbers, and much
fewer in proportion.
Exactly such a study was made by Wayne Dennis. Using as
his source the National Academy of Sciences Biographical
Memoirs for 1943-52, he showed that of the 41 men who died
after a full life, having reached the age of 70, the top man had
768 publications, the bottom 27. The average number of publi­
cations was more than 200, and only 15 persons had fewer than
100 in their bibliographies. Similarly, a list of 25 eminent
nineteenth-century scientists showed that all but one were in
the range of 61 to 307 items.^ Further, taking a sample from the
Royal Society Bibliography of Scientific Literature 1800-1900,
he showed that the most productive 10 percent of all authors,
having each more than 50 publications, were of such caliber
that 50 percent of them gained the distinction of mention in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica; of the top 5 percent, each of whom
had more than 140 items to his bibliography, some 70 percent
received such mention. None of those mentioned in the Ency-
clopaedia by virtue of their scientific work had fewer than seven
publications.
Thus, although there is no guarantee that the small producer
is a nonentity and the big producer a distinguished scientist, or
even that the order of merit follows the order of productivity,
there is a strong correlation,® and we are interested in looking
deeper into the relative distribution of big- and small-output
writers of scientific literature. Such studies are easy to make by
counting the number of items under each author’s name in
‘ The exception being Riemann, who published only 19 papers but
died at the age of 40.
“ Productivity is therefore one of many factors.

Fig. 12. LOTKA S LAW
The number of authors publishing exactly n papers, as a function of n.
The open circles represent data taken from the first index volume of the
abridged Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
(17th and early 18th centuries), the filled circles those from the 1907-16
decennial index of Chemical Abstracts. The straight line shows the exact
inverse-square law of Lotka. All data are reduced to a basis of exactly
100 authors publishing but a single paper.
GALTON R E V ISIT E D 43
the cumulative index of a journal. A pioneer investigation of
this sort was made by Lotka,® and several others have since re­
peated such head counts. They all confirm a simple, basic result
that does not seem to depend upon the type of science or the
date of the index volume; the only requirement is that the index
extend over a number of years sufficient to enable those who
can produce more than a couple of papers to do so.
The result of this investigation is an inverse-square law of
productivity (Fig. 12). The number of people producing n
papers is proportional to 1/n^. For every 100 authors who pro­
duce but a single paper in a certain period, there are 25 with
two, 11 with three, and so on. Putting it a httle diflFerently by
permitting the results to cumulate, one achieves an integration
that gives approximately an inverse first-power law for the num­
ber of people who produce more than n papers; thus, about one
in five authors produces five papers or more, and one in ten
produces at least ten papers (Fig. 13).
It is surprising that such a simple law should be followed so
accurately and that one should find the same distribution of
scientific productivity in the early volumes of the Royal Society
as in data from the twentieth-century Chemical Abstracts. The
regularity, I suggest, tells us something about the nature of the
scores we are keeping. An inverse-square law probability dis­
tribution, or an inverse first power for the cumulative prob­
ability, is nothing like either the normal Gaussian or Poisson
distributions, or any of the other such curves given by normal
hnear measure of events that go by chance. If the number of
scientific papers were distributed in a manner similar to that of
* Alfred J. Lotka, “The frequency distribution of scientific productivity,”
Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 16 (1926), 317. For
a fuller analysis and justification see Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man,
Social and National (New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1957), p. 160.
 G A L T O N R E V IS IT E D 4 5

the number of men with various heights, or the number kicked

to death by horses, we should find far fewer large scores. Sci­
entific papers do not rain from heaven so that they are dis­
tributed by chance; on the contrary, up to a point, the more you

TABLE 2
SCHEMATIC TABLE SHOWING NUMBERS OF AUTHORS
OF VARIOUS DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVITY (IN
PAPERS PER LIFETIME) AND NUMBERS
OF PAPERS SO PRODUCED‘‘
Papers/man Men Papers
1 100 100 (The 75 percent of men who
2 25 50 are low scorers produce one-
3 11.1 33.3 quarter of all papers.)
4 6.2 25
5 4 20
6 2.8 16.7
7 2 14.2
8 1.5 12.5
9 1.2 11.1
10 1 10
10-11.1 1 10-f
11.1-12.5 1 11.1-1-
12.5-14.2 1 12.5+
14.2-16.7 1 14.2+ (Subtotal: 10 men produce
16.7-20 1 16.7+ more than 50 percent of all
20-25 1 20+ papers.)
25-33.3 1 25+
33.3-50 1 33.3+
50-100 1 50+ (The top two men produce
Over 100 1 100+ one-quarter of all papers.)
Total 165 586+
Average papers/man = 586/165 = 3.54
• Table constructed on basis of exactly 100 men with a single pub­
Fig. 13. NUM BER OF AUTHORS PUBLISHING AT LEA ST fl PAPERS lished paper. Other entries computed from Lotka’s law.
AS A FUNCTION OF fl
Same data, and same reduction as for Fig. 12, but full curve here is
modified to a form that takes account of Lotka’s overestimation of the
number of highly prolific authors (see footnote 8, Chapter 2 ).
46 GALTON R E V ISIT E D
have the easier it seems to be to get the next, a principle to
Nvhich we shall return later.
Let us first examine the nature of the crude inverse-square
law of productivity (Table 3). If one computes the total pro­
duction of those who write n papers, it emerges that the large
number of low producers account for about as much of the
total as the small number of large producers; in a simple sche­
matic case, symmetry may be shown to a point corresponding
to the square root of the total number of men, or the score of
the highest producer. If there are 100 authors, and the most
prolific has a score of 100 papers, half of all the papers will have
been written by the 10 highest scorers, and the other half by
those with fewer than 10 papers each. In fact, in this ideal case,
a full quarter of the papers have been written by the top two
men, and another quarter by those who publish only one or
two items.
This immediately gives an objective method for separating
the major from the minor contributors. One may set a limit and
say that half the work is done by those with more than 10 papers
to their credit, or that the number of high producers seems to
be the same order of magnitude as the square root of the total
number of authors. The first way, setting some quota of 10 or
✓ <
so papers, which may be termed “Deans’ method,” is familiar
Fig. 14. NUM BERS OF PUBLICATIONS OF FOUR SERIES OF HIGHLY
enough; the second way, suggesting that the number of men
DISTINGUISHED AND ( IN Cm EN TA LLY) HIGHLY PROLIFIC
goes up as the square of the number of good ones, seems con­
AUTHORS, EACH RANKED W ITHIN TH E SERIES
sistent with the previous findings that the number of scientists
doubles every 10 years, but the number of noteworthy scientists The series are (1 ) members of the National Academy of Sciences, drawn
from obituary bibliographies, (2 ) nineteen eminent scientists of the 19th
only every 20 years. century, (3 ) most prolific authors in decennial index of Chemical Ab~
Unfortunately, Lotka’s simple inverse-square law needs stracts, (4 ) index to Vols. 1-70, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
modification in the case of high scorers ( Fig. 14). Beyond the Society.

division lines mentioned, the number of people falls oflF more

 48 G A LTO N R E V ISIT E D
rapidly than the inverse square, more nearly approximating
the inverse cube. It amounts to the same thing to say that their
cumulative number falls off as the square of the score rather
than as its first power. The data from the work of Lotka and
Dennis agree completely on this, i.e., if one ranks the high
scorers in order of merit, their scores fall as the square root of
the ranks in all cases.
By means of this one may easily derive a law which holds
both for the low and high scorers and which slightly cuts down
the upper tail of the Lotka distribution.® One can see that this
should be qualitatively necessary, since otherwise the maxi­
mum scores of published papers in a lifetime would be thou­
sands and even tens of thousands rather than the several hun­
dreds that seem to represent even the most prolific scientific
^Wayne Dennis, “Bibliographies of eminent scientists,” The Scientific
Monthly, 79 (September, 1954), 180-83.
®For the graphical presentations given here we have used a distribu­
tion law of the form
ak
N = J t ( - ---- — ) =
\P a+ pj p (a + p)
where N is the cumulative number of men who publish at least p sci­
entific papers within a given interval of time (here taken as a lifetime).
For those of low productivity 1 < p < a, and the law tends to the inverse
first-power form N = k/p, while for the high-productivity authors we
have a < p < and the law approximates the inverse-square form
N = ak/p^. We find that the available data may be fitted by taking the
boundary between high and low productivities at a = 15 papers per
lifetime.
From the given distribution law one is able to compute in sequence
the number of people pubhshing exactly p papers, the number of papers
published in all by such people and, finally, the cumulative number
of papers published by the cumulative number of authors. This enables
one to calculate all the properties of such a distribution in terms of the
parameter, a, and the arbitrary constant of proportionahty, k. It happens,
for example, that the average number of papers per author is given by
1 - f (1 -f 1/a) log ( l - |- c ) which is very insensitive to the magnitude of
a, assuming a value of 3 for a = 7, and a value of 4 for a = 22.
G ALTO N R E V ISIT E D 49
lives. Cayley, one of the great British mathematicians of the
nineteenth century, has 995 items in his collected works—a
paper every two to three weeks—and I have failed to find any­
one who outstrips this.
This modified law leads to the result that about one-third of
the literature and less than one-tenth of the men are associated
with high scores. It leads, furthermore, to an average of 3 ^
papers per man. Thus, if we know how many papers are pub­
lished in a field, we can compute the number of men who have
written them, even the much smaller number who must be
reckoned as distinguished contributors to that field. Thus, for
a field containing 1000 papers, there will be about 300 authors.
About 180 of them will not get beyond their first paper, but
another 30 will be above our cutoff of 10 papers each, and 10
will be highly prolific, major contributors.
More important than numerical information is the proved
existence of a workable distribution law. One may make an in­
teresting comparison between this and the famous Pareto law
of distribution of income.® Instead of a form following 1/n for
small values and l/n^ for large, Pareto found that cumulative
figures for income followed, almost exactly, and constantly over
a long time in different countries, a law of 1/n^ *^—just midway
between our two forms. Why is there such an empirical law,
and why is it so very different from the usual laws of errors,
horse kicks, and other probability distributions?
The reason lies, I think, in the simple fact tliat the number
of publications is not a linear additive measure of productivity
in the way required for Gaussian distributions. Our cutoff point
is not the average of the highest score and the lowest but rather
their geometric mean. One feels intuitively that the step from
• The law was proposed in detail in V. Pareto, Cours d’economic poli­
tique (1897), Vol. 2, pp. 299-345.
 50 G A LT O N R E V ISIT E D
three papers to six is similar to that from 30 to 60 rather than
that from 30 to 33. Because of all this it is reasonable to suggest
that we have here something like the approximate law of Fech-
ner or Weber in experimental psychology, wherein the true
measure of the response is taken not by the magnitude of the
stimulus but by its logarithm; we must have equal intervals of
effort corresponding to equal ratios of numbers of publica­
tions.^®
We may define a man’s solidness, s (how solid a fellow is
he?) as the logarithm of his life’s score of papers. The logarithm
of the number of men having at least s units of solidness of
productivity will at first fall linearly with s, then more rapidly
as it approaches the fixed upper limit of 1000 papers, beyond
which no man has achieved. In other words, for every unit in­
crease in solidness, the number of men attaining such solidness
is cut by some almost constant factor. Now this fall of the popu­
lation by a constant factor for each unit increase of s is exactly
what one finds in the tail of a normal probability distribution.
For example, if we take the standard AGCT intelligence-test
distribution, which is so arranged that the norm is 100 on the
scale, with half the population above and half below, and a
spread such that the quartiles are at 80 and 120 ( i.e., the stand­
ard deviation is 20), then for scores over about 140 (and also
less than 60) the number of cases in the tail drops by a factor
of 10 for every 10 points on the scale. If we measure solidness by
“ Cf. Gallon’s citation of the marks gained by the wranglers in the
Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. Their scores, as nearly as possible on
an objective open scale of merit, were such that the top candidate in
each year got almost twice the marks of the second, and 30 times that
of the 100th candidate.
The log-normal character of scientific productivity distributions has
previously been suggested by William Shockley, “On the statistics of
individual variations of productivity in research laboratories,” Proceedings
of the Institute of Radio Engineers, 45 (1957), 279, 1409.
GALTON R E V ISIT E D 51
logarithms to base 10, then every unit of s corresponds to about
11 points on the AGCT scale for all but the most solid scientific
citizens, and for these it rises to about 20 points.
Pareto’s law may therefore be regarded as merely the result
of combining a reasonable probability distribution of capabil­
ities with a Fechner’s law measure of the effectiveness of these
capabilities. In the case of scientific productivity we find a
similar happy accounting on a theoretical basis for the shape of
the empirical law. The only difference between the distribu­
tions of money and papers, or the more generalized distribution
found by Zipf to account for nearly all natural distributions of
things ranked in order of size, is that for science there is a
definite upper limit to the amount that one man can accomplish
in a lifetime.
Our one remaining uncertainty about the new law of normal
distribution of scientific solidness is that we do not know where
to put the beginning of the scale. What AGGT score corre­
sponds to the state s = 0, the minimal state of one scientific
publication during a lifetime? If, without altering the presum­
ably absolute and objective minimum standards for a scientific
paper, one could induce every member of the population to go
through the motions of education and professional training, and
try to achieve this goal, how many would succeed?
This question is extraordinarily diflScult to answer, for apart
from a great corpus of general intelligence tests the competence
level of the quantitative art is low when appHed to deciding
what makes for scientific creativity. On the basis of our newly
won theory, one can now hazard a guess from intelligence tests
alone. The fundamental investigations by Harmon on records
” Lindsey R. Hannon, “The high school backgrounds of science doc­
torates,” Science, 133 (March 10, 1961), 679, also published at length
in Scientific Manpower 1960 (N SF 61-34, May 1961), pp. 14-28.
5 2 G A L T O N R E V IS IT E D GALTON R E V ISIT E D 53

of the United States crop of Ph.D.’s for 1958 enable us to say
something of the incidence and of the intelligence-test char­
acteristics of this group. Now, the Ph.D. and the editorial stand­
ards of learned periodical publications are things that we have
done our best to keep constant. It is therefore reasonable to
identify the minimum effort of writing a single scientific paper
with that demanded by the “sheepskin gateway” to the road of
research. Although it is agreed that these things do not coincide,
since some Ph.D.’s never publish even their theses, whereas
many authors are not doctors, yet at worst they should differ by
some reasonably constant ratio not too far from unity.
Harmon found that in an age group of the population num­
bering about 2,400,000 there arises an annual crop of about
8000 Ph.D.’s in all fields, the physical and biological sciences
together comprising about half the total. As one might expect,
the intelligence-test scores for this group were considerably
higher than the general level, the average being AGCT 130*8
for the mode of the distribution. Taken by fields, there was a
variation from 140*3 for physics to 123*3 for Ph.D.’s in educa­
tion:
Physics 140*3
Mathematics 138*2
Engineering 134*8
Geology 133*3
Arts and humanities 132*1
Social sciences 132*0
Natural sciences 131*7
Chemistry 131*5
Biology 126*1
Education 123*3
When these data were applied to the general population in
the same age group, it appeared that at the highest level of in­
telligence recorded, AGCT 170+, about one person in five re­
ceived a Ph.D., although the general incidence of doctorates in
the age group was only 1 in 3000. Thus, intelhgence has a lot
to do with the gaining of Ph.D.’s. If we now consider it plau­
sible that this current figure of one in five refers to those supe­
rior beings who become highly productive scientists, one could
contemplate using all means, fair and foul, to close the gap so
that they would all earn Ph.D.’s or even scientific Ph.D.’s.
We know now that the total number of scientists goes up as
the square, more or less, of the number of good ones. There­
fore, if we want to multiply the good scientists by five, we must
multiply the whole group by 25. Instead of an age group of
about 8000 Ph.D.’s in mixed subjects, we should then have
about 200,000, all in science. As it happens, the intelligence dis­
tribution shows that in an age group of 2,400,000, a few more
than 160,000 achieve AGCT 130, and so we have a minimal
cutoff for possible scientists that is only slightly less than the
present mode found for Ph.D.’s, both scientific and otherwise.
The two methods thus coincide to indicate that about 6 to 8
percent of the population at most could be minimal scien­
tists.
Apparently, then, the scale of solidness in scientific publica­
tion should have its zero placed at an AGCT level of about 130,
corresponding to about one person in every 15 in an age group.
Attractive though it may be to perceive such a cutoff point,
agreeing as it does so well with the present norm for Ph.D.’s,
the impHcations are grave. At first sight it appears that at pres­
ent we are tapping only about one in 25 of those who could be­
come scientists at all, and a fifth of those who would be out­
standing scientists. If we took all the talent of the population
with no loss or wastage, we should then have 8,000,000 scien-
5 4 G A L T O N R E V IS IT E D
tists writing papers in the United S t a t e s , ^nd, of these, 80,000
would be highly productive, with more than 10 papers each.
Thus, we should have a roll of 40,000 scientists to a million
population, and, of these, 400 in a million would be men of note.
Galton, you remember, found about 5 to 10 eminent scientists
in a million population, and the early volumes of American Men
of Science showed 50 in a million. Thus, in the density of good
scientists we have left one more order of magnitude at the most
and, even at the expense of all other high-talent occupations,
science is not likely to engross more than 8 percent of the popu­
lation. Even so, it looks as if the decreasing return of good sci­
entists to every 100 Ph.D.’s will make it more and more difficult
to reach a level of this magnitude. Just how strong is this hmi-
tation? Is it possible that the level of good scientists cannot rise
by the factor of five that we have presumed?
Almost half of the factor is accounted for by the wastage of
scientific womanpower, a wastage that the U.S.S.R. has par­
tially checked but that we seem unable to avoid. Another factor
of two might be attributed to the lack of opportunity and in­
centive in regions outside the big cities where schools are good
and competition and inspiration keen. Indeed, all things con­
sidered, the high proportion of talented manpower successfully
diverted into science at present is surely to our credit. But if
the level cannot indeed rise, then we are, as we have already
conjectured, about halfway toward saturation at the top end of
the scale, and any increase in numbers of scientists must pro­
duce an even greater preponderance of manpower able to write
scientific papers, but not able to write distinguished ones. It
gives serious pause to thoughts about the future of scientific
education. Is it worth much sacrifice?
“ This is more than twice the present world population of scientists.
GALTON R E V ISIT E D 55
I think we have now laid the theoretical basis for this study
of science. It is remarkably similar to the study of econometrics.
On the one hand we have the dynamic treatment that gives us
time series, first of exponential growth, then of the saturated
growth resulting in standard logistic curves. On the other hand,
we have the statics of a distribution law similar to that of
Pareto. The extent of the difference between analyzing science
and analyzing business hes in the parameters. The main ex­
ponential part of the growth of science doubles in 10 years only,
which is much more rapid than all else; the characteristic index
of the distribution law is one at the low end and two at the
high, instead of a uniform 1*5.
The additional contributions that we have made lie in pro­
viding a reasonable theoretical basis for our Pareto law and in
showing that, although the average number of papers per
author remains sensibly constant, one may make a split between
those whose productivity is high and that much larger mass of
authors whose productivity is low. This mass is seen to grow as
the square of the number of high scorers, and therefore the
number of high scorers will appear to double only every 20
years.
The Fechner law principle which we invoked to reduce the
Pareto-hke distribution to the sort of linear and additive meas­
ure that is necessary for a standard probability curve is much
more powerful than we have yet assumed. If we may take in
general the solidness of a body of pubhcations as measured by
the logarithm of the number of papers, it has further interesting
consequences. Consider the law of exponential growth previ­
ously mentioned as a universal condition of freely expanding
science. Obviously, the solidness of the field, the logarithm of
the number of papers, grows linearly with time. Thus, since it
 56 G A LTO N R E V ISIT E D
takes about 50 years for the number of men or number of papers
in a field to multiply by 10, there is a unit increase of soHdness
every half-century.^®
I cannot quite see why it is so, or how one might judge it other
than by pure intuition, but the two units of solidness separating
the man who can publish no more than one paper in a lifetime
from the one who can write a hundred such papers are essen­
tially the same as those that separate the two states of a subject
at dates a century apart. In rough, and misleading, terms one
might say that the eminent scientist is a century ahead of the
minimal one.
What further implications are there of the assumption that
one can measure the progress of a field by the linear march of
its solidness? Are such degrees of solidness truly additive? Must
we judge one field of a hundred workers adding two units of
solidness within a certain time as inferior to 10 separate fields
of 10 workers, each of whom will add one unit to each field,
making a total of 10 units within the same time?
If such an indication be true, then it seems that science has
a strong desire to minimize its solidness rather than make it as
large as possible. Beyond the phenomenon of exponential
growth, science displays in several ways a tendency to crystal­
lize out, in the sense that big things grow at the expense of the
small ones that constitute a sort of mother liquor. Large fields
seem to absorb the manpower and subject matter of small ones.
Even though new fields, new departments, new institutions,
and even new countries arrive on the scientific scene in increas­
ing number, the few previously existing large ones have a nat-
“ This, then, provides a measure that is linear, not exponential. It is
the sort of index which might correspond with Nobel Prizes (which
come linearly with time because that is how they are organized); pos-
>iblv also with unexpected, crucial advances.
G A LTO N R E V ISIT E D 57
ural growth enabling them in general to maintain their lead. It
is the exception, rather than the rule, for one of the big blocks
to slacken its growth—presumably through the existence of
some sort of logistic ceiling that causes it to stagnate—and be
overtaken so that it falls in rank.
The fact that the general growth of science increases equally
the sizes of the large blocks and the numbers of the small blocks,
while presenting an appearance of crystallization, is really not
so peculiar. Precisely the same thing happens when the popu­
lation of a country grows. Instead of being uniformly distrib­
uted over the country, it is crystallized out into variously sized
blocks called cities. The growth of cities in a country provides a
useful model for the growths of scientific blocks within science.
As it happens, the hierarchical order of cities or other blocks,
ranked by decreasing size, offers yet another example of the
same Pareto-like distribution we have already found for the
productivity of scientific authors.
In the case of cities, the historical statistics provide a good
example of such a distribution on the move, with everything
increasing exponentially while maintaining the normal distribu­
tion (Fig. 15).^^ Using a plot showing the distribution at each
decade, one may see the constant slope of the distribution on a
log-log scale and the inexorable march of the intercepts that
tell us the magnitude of the biggest city on the one scale and
the number of minimal cities (here taken as population 2500)
on the other scale. Both increase regularly each decade, taking
about 60 years each to go through a power of 10 or, as we have
called it before, one unit of solidness. If one looked in detail at
Figure 15 and the following data are from G, K. Zipf, Human Be­
havior and the Principle of Least Effort (Cambridge, Mass., Addison-
Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1949), p. 420, Fig. 10-2.

Communities of 2500 or more inhabitants ranked in the decreasing order
of population size. It should be noted that the distribution at any given
date shows size decreasing uniformly with rank; as cities become more
numerous and all of them increase in size, the distribution pattern is
preserved, the curve moving parallel to itself at a constant rate. From
George K. Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort { Cam­
bridge, Mass,, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1949), p. 420,
Fig. 10-2.
GALTON R E V ISIT E D 59
well by such diverse hierarchical hsts as those giving the sizes
in faculties, or in Ph.D.’s per decade, of the college scientific
departments, in any field or in general, in the United States or
in the world. It is followed by ranked lists showing the scientific
contributions, in terms of papers, journals, or expenditures of
the nations of the world, ranging from the few big producers
on any scale relative or absolute to the minor production of the
large number of underdeveloped countries (Fig. 16).^®
About this process there is the same sort of essential, built-in
undemocracy that gives us a nation of cities rather than a coun­
try steadily approximating a state of uniform population den­
sity. Scientists tend to congregate in fields, in institutions, in
countries, and in the use of certain journals. They do not spread
out uniformly, however desirable that may or may not be. In
particular, the growth is such as to keep relatively constant the
balance between the few giants and the mass of pygmies. The
number of giants grows so much more slowly than the entire
population that there must be more and more pygmies per giant,
deploring their own lack of stature and wondering why it is that
neither man nor nature pushes us toward egalitarian uni­
formity.
Value judgments aside, it seems clear that the existence of a
reasonable distribution that tells us how many men, papers,
countries, or journals there are in each rank of productivity,
utility, or whatever you will measure provides a powerful tool.
Instead of attempting to get precision in defining which heads
to count in exponential growth, one may instead take a crude
count and interpret it by means of such a distribution.
Just as one cannot measure the individual velocities of aU
’®Data from a preliminary survey of scientific periodicals by the Li­
brary of Congress.
 G A LTO N R E V ISIT E D 61
molecules in a gas, one cannot actually measure the degrees of
eminence of all scientists. However, there are reasonable
grounds for saying that such measurements, if made, would
follow the standard distribution. In particular, we can take this
Pareto-like distribution as a hypothesis and see how the con­
sequences agree with gross phenomena which we can measure.
We do, in fact, find a reassuring agreement.
Such, then, is the broad mathematical matrix of exponential
growth, logistic decay, and distribution functions. It provides
us now with a general description of the normal expansion of
science and its state at any time. Knowing now the regular
behavior, we have a powerful tool for investigating the signifi­
cant irregularities injected into the system by the gross per­
turbations of war and revolution, by the logistic birth and death
of measurable entities, by genius and crucial discovery, and,
in short, by all the organizational changes within the body
politic of science and in its relations with the state and society
in general.

( 3)
INVISIBLE C O L L E G E S
AND THE A F F L U E N T
S C I E N T I F I C CO MM UTE R
FROM A LL the talk of exponential growth and scientific produc­
tivity distributions, one might think that scientific papers were
produced merely to be counted by deans, administrators, and
historians and that the driving force of a scientist should be
directed toward producing the maximum number of contribu­
tions. This is far from the truth. An almost instinctive reaction
away from all this counting nonsense is to agree that each paper
represents at least a quantum of useful scientific information
and that some single contributions may rise so far above this
quantum value that for such a one alone its author would be
valued above any random hundred, or even above a hundred
more prolific writers.
To take the opposite point of view and look into the tangible
results of scientific work more deeply than by mere head­
counting, we must know considerably more about the social
institutions of science and the psychology of the scientist. The
prime object of the scientist is not, after all, the publication of
scientific papers. Further, the paper is not for him purely and
simply a means of communicating knowledge.
Let us look at the history of the scientific paper. It all began
IN V IS IB L E C O L L E G E S 63
because there were too many books. Here is a cry from the
heart of a scholar:
One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they
doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abun­
dance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth
into the world.
It is chastening to find that these words were written by the
rambunctious Bamaby Rich in 1613, half a century before the
scientific journal was born. The coming of the learned peri­
odical promised an end to this iniquity of overcharge. Develop­
ing in time and spirit together with the newspaper, such pub­
lications as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
had the stated function of digesting the books and doings of
the learned all over Europe. Through them the casual reader
might inform himself without the network of personal corre­
spondence, private rumor, and browsing in Europe’s book­
stores, formerly essential.
At first, however, they did not by any means remit the schol­
arly obligation to read books and write them. Their original
purpose was a social one of finding out what was being done
and by whom rather than a scholarly one of publishing new
knowledge.^
Original publication of short papers by single authors was a
distinct innovation in the life of science and, like all innovations,
it met with considerable resistance from scientists. Barber ^ has
^ However, publications of the learned academies as corporate bodies
engaged in the experiments and trials for which they had been con­
stituted had appeared before. The Saggi of the Accademia del Cimento,
which preceded the societies of London and Paris, is a volume of fine
research papers published as a complete and final single book, not as a
serial.
®B. Barber, “Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery,” Scientific
Manpower 1960 ( National Science Foundation Publication N SF 61-34,
May 1961), pp. 36-47.
64 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES
pointed out that such resistance is part of a vital mechanism of
innate conservatism in the body of science. It is a natural
counterpart to the open-minded creativity that floods it with
too many new ideas, and to the edge of objectivity that forms
an eventual means of deciding between true and false.
Such resistance against the new and seemingly ilhcit practice
of publishing papers instead of decent books is seen in the case
of Newton. The controversies over his optical papers in the
Philosophical Transactions were a source of deep distress to
him, and afterwards he did not relish publication until it could
take the proper form of a finished book, treating the subject
from begining to end and meeting all conceivable objections
and side arguments. If the journal had been at that time an
effective means of communication, we might never have had
the Principia. Perhaps we should begin to disregard a man’s
papers and look at his books.
The transformation of the scientific paper into its modem
state was not complete until about a century ago. Before that
time there was much publication of scientific “snippets,” such
as the bare mention of something achieved, or a review of ob­
servations that had been made and published elsewhere. There
were also plenty of monographic publications that would have
been books in themselves if only the means for profitable print­
ing and distribution had existed. As late as 1900, some of the
most respected journals contained not one scientific paper of
the present variety. The difference is not only one of length—
if they are too short, they are letters; if too long, monographs.
I would rather make a distinction in the mode of cumulation
of the papers. This has to do with the way in which each paper
is built on a foundation of previous papers, then in turn is one
of several points of departure for the next. The most obvious
IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES 65
manifestation of this scholarly bricklaying is the citation of
references. One cannot assume that all authors have been ac­
curate, consistent, and conscientious in noting their sources.
Some have done too little, others too much. But it is generally
evident from a long run of any scientific periodical that around
1850 there appears the familiar modern pattern of explicit refer­
ence to previous work on which rests the distinct, well-knit
addition that is the ideal burden of each paper. Before that
time, though footnoting is as old as scholarship itself—compare
the very term scholia for the ancient footnote—there is nothing
hke this attitude toward the accretion of learning.
If, then, the prototype of the modem scientific paper is a
social device rather than a technique for cumulating quanta
of information, what strong force called it into being and kept
it alive? Beyond a doubt, the motive was the establishment
and maintenance of intellectual property. It was the need
which scientists felt to lay claim to newly won knowledge as
their own, the never-gentle art of establishing priority claims.
In a pair of perceptive papers,^ Robert Merton has analyzed
the way in which priority claims and disputes have been
omnipresent during the past few centuries of science. The phe­
nomenon emerges as a dominant thread in the history of sci­
ence, woven through the stories of all men in aU lands. It is fair
to say that to understand the sociological character of such dis­
putes is more important for the historian than merely to settle
such claims.
The evidence makes it plain that multiple discovery—^that
• Robert K. Merton, “Priorities in scientific discovery: a chapter in
the sociology of science,” American Sociological Review, 22 (1957),
635; “Singletons and multiples in scientific discovery: a chapter in the
sociology of science,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,
105 (October, 1961), 470.
 66 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES IN V IS IB L E CO LLEGES 67
is, discovery by two or more individuals working separately— the Poisson distribution it is found that 368 men will be success­
occurs with remarkable frequency, that it often gives rise to ful and that 264 cases will involve the remaining 632 men in
disputes for priority among the parties concerned, and that contested claims (Table 3).
these disputes may be laced with the bitterest and most violent
passions of which the protagonists are capable. Several im­ TABLE 3
POISSON DISTRIBUTION AND SIMULTANEOUS
portant things about the life of science may be learned from DISCOVERY
this analysis.
Number of Merton data 1000 apples and men
First, the multiplicity of discovery runs so high in so many simultaneous discoverers cases cases
cases that one is almost persuaded that it is a widespread occur­ 368
0 Indeterminate
rence rather than a chance rarity. As Galton remarks, “When 1 No data 368
apples are ripe they fall readily.” One may go further, as Kuhn ^ 2 179 184
has done, and remark that although some discoveries, such as 3 51 61
4 17 15
X rays or oxygen, take one completely by surprise, there are 3
5 6
many, many more which are more or less expected, and toward 6 or more 8 1
which several people are working simultaneously. It is in the
latter class that we experience the multiple discovery and the The agreement between expectation and fact, at least for
disputed priority, though probably the disputants would hotly the doublet, triplet, and quadruplet discoveries, is striking but
contest that their prize discovery was in no wise expected and must not be given too much credence. To fit the data we have
that their opponent had either stolen the idea or had discovered made two arbitrary assumptions: first, that we start with 1000
only inadvertently a part of the essential new matter. pickers or discoverers; second, that there shall be on the aver­
The figures cited by Merton and Barber ®for the historical age one prize for each. The first assumption is reasonable, for
incidence of multiple discovery in various degrees enable us one cannot avoid adjusting the data to some sort of total popu­
to test, in a fashion highly instructive, the “ripe apple” model. lation. The second is harder to justify, especially as it involves
If there are 1000 apples on a tree, and 1000 blindfolded men 368 apples that were not picked at all, discoveries that were
reach up at random to pick an apple, what is the chance of a missed because of the overlapping hands. As a first approxima­
man’s getting one to himself, or finding himself grasping as well tion, however, we note that only 37 percent of the seekers will
the hand of another picker, or even more than one? This is a establish uncontested claims, the remaining 63 percent will end
straightforward question in statistical probability. By means of in multiple discovery. In terms of actual discoveries made, the
* Thomas S. Kuhn, “Historical structure of scientific discovery,” Sci­ position is a little brighter: about 58 percent will be unique, and
ence, 136 (June 1, 1962), 760. only 42 percent will be shared by two or more.
®Cited in Merton, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,
105 (October, 1961), 483 left.
As a second approximation, the data show more instances
 68 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES
than we expect by random choice involving five or more coin­
cident pickers of the same discovery. Perhaps the apples that
appear to be biggest and most ready to drop attract more than
their due share of the pickers, but this is only a minor amend­
ment to the gross phenomenon.
Not all cases of multiple discovery end in hotly contested pri­
ority disputes. Merton shows that the tendency has decreased
as we have become used to the idea that this is bound to hap­
pen, the proportion of disputes being 92 percent in the seven­
teenth century, 72 percent in the eighteenth, 59 percent by the
latter half of the nineteenth, and 33 percent in the first half of
the present century.
Even at these rates, the passion generated and the large
amount of overlapping discovery that seems to have been with
us throughout the recorded history of the scientific paper makes
us wary of the role of that device. If it is for front-line com­
munication, then we must feel that it has always done a remark­
ably poor job of preventing overlapping researches. The apple-
pickers appear to act as if they were blindfolded to the eflForts
of others rather than as if they had any information in time for
them to move their hands to one of the many untouched fruits.
If paper publication is not for front-line communication, let us
cease to complain about overlapping.
The scientific paper therefore seems to arise out of the claim-
staking brought on by so much overlapping endeavor. The so­
cial origin is the desire of each man to record his claim and
reserve it to himself. Only incidentally does the paper serve as
a carrier of information, an announcement of new knowledge
promulgated for the good of the world, a giving of free advan­
tage to all one’s competition. Indeed, in past centuries it was
not uncommon for a Galileo, Hooke, or Kepler to announce his
discovery as a cryptogram of jumbled letters that reserved
IN V ISIB L E CO LLEGES 69
priority without conferring the information that would help
his rivals. In the present day, as Reif has pointed out, the intense
competition to publish “fustest and mostest” and thereby
achieve prestige has resulted in a long series of abuses and high
emotions ranging from illicit publication in the New York Times
to rare cases of fraudulent claim.®
Why the scientist acts in this way is another question. The
answer to it, I feel, may involve some rather deep psychological
analysis of the scientific character. At the root of the matter is
the basic difference that exists between creative effort in the
sciences and in the arts.”^ If Michelangelo or Beethoven had
not existed, their works would have been replaced by quite
different contributions. If Copernicus or Fermi had never
existed, essentially the same contributions would have had to
come from other people. There is, in fact, only one world to
discover, and as each morsel of perception is achieved, the dis­
coverer must be honored or forgotten. The artist’s creation is
intensely personal, whereas that of the scientist needs recogni­
tion by his peers. The ivory tower of the artist can be a one-man
ceff; that of the scientist must contain many apartments so that
he may be housed among his peers.
Two important implications emerge from this analysis. First,
scientific communication by way of the published paper is and
always has been a means of settling priority conflicts by claim-
staking rather than avoiding them by giving information.
Second, claims to scientific property are vital to the make-up
of the scientist and his institutions. For these reasons scientists
* F. Reif, “The competitive world of the pure scientist,” Science, 134
(December 15, 1961), 1957-62.
’ A beginning for such analysis has been made by Karl W. Deutsch,
“ Scientific and Humanistic Knowledge in the Growth of Civilization,”
in Science and the Creative Spirit (Toronto, Ont., University of Toronto
Press, 1958), pp. 3-51.
 70 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES
have a strong urge to write papers but only a relatively mild
one to read them. For these reasons there is a considerable
social organization of scientists whose aim is to establish and
secure the prestige and priority they desire by means more
eflBcient than the traditional device of journal publication.
When one talks about the information problem in science, it
is, I feel, important not to confuse the matter with that which
we have just described. For three centuries science has lived
eflEectively with the high incidence of multiple discovery and
disputed claims for priority. At every turn in past history it
was to be regretted that X’s ideas were not known to Y. The
overlapping could hardly have been worse, and there is no
clear evidence that it has ever either improved or deteriorated.
Perhaps it is not just the counsel of despair to posit that
science has lived vigorously if not happily on its diet of dis­
putes and duplications. Perhaps it is even desirable that many
of the important discoveries should be made two or three
times over in an independent and slightly diflFerent fashion.
Perhaps men must themselves recreate such discoveries be­
fore they can usefully and effectively go on to the next stage.
We seem nowadays to dispute less about the same amount
of overlapping, but perhaps we have only turned our wrath
against the societies, publishers, librarians, and editors who
seem to conspire to leave us in such a duplication-prone posi­
tion. However, let us be fair. We may complain that they
have not removed this stumbling block from our path, but
we cannot well complain that it has grown worse. It could
hardly be worse. Our information problem, assuming we
have one, is of a different nature.
Let us first look at the organization problem of scientific
literature in terms of the input and output of any one man.
We have seen that the normal scientist may during his life­
IN V ISIB L E CO LLEGES 71
time publish papers ranging in number from a minimal one
up to several hundred and that the borderline between many
and few is about the geometric mean between these limits.
Consider now how much he must read in order to produce
those papers. At the beginning of his career, his teachers and
his basic reading of books and current literature in a chosen
subject will have placed him at the research front, and from
there he will perhaps be able to voyage alone on uncharted
seas. If this man remains in a field of which he is the sole
exponent, he can read nothing besides his own papers. Such
is the life of the lone pioneer who has no need to read journals
and publishes (if he does) only for the good of future
generations.
But life is usually -not like that. The man arriving at the
research front finds others with the same basic training in
the same subject looking at the same problems and trying to
pick apples off the same tree. He will want to monitor the
work of these similar individuals who are his rivals and his
peers. He will want to leapfrog over their advances rather
than duplicate them. How many such individuals can be so
handled? I suggest that the answer is on the order of a hun­
dred. Surely he can read one paper for every one he writes.
Just as surely, he cannot efficiently monitor 10,000 papers
for each one of his own, at which rate the good man who
writes 100 papers in a lifetime would be reading a million,
or more than 60 a day.
Another way of deriving this ratio is to think of the number
of people with whom a good scientist can exchange offprints
and preprints, professional correspondence, and with whom
he can perhaps collaborate at a reasonable and comprehensive
level. Publishers have their records of the purchase of reprints,
but I know of no published figures. My guess is that there
72 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES
are a few hundred colleagues for every worker. Here, of
course, we are dealing with numbers of actual men rather
than with numbers of papers due to effective men. We do
read several papers by people who are not on our lists, after
all, and correspondingly ignore some of the output by our
friends.
There is yet another way of looking at this ratio. The norm
of the number of papers given as references in a research
paper has for many years been constant at a little less than
ten. Supposing we read, closely enough to cite them, about
10 papers for every one we actually cite, there would then
have been about 100 papers read for every one published. Our
tendency to faithfully repeat citations of our favorite and
most useful papers only reduces this figure.
It seems then that we can handle an effective input that
is little more than a few hundred times the size of our output.
Perhaps those who write little have more time for reading
than those who are prolific, so that there is some sort of
balance. Perhaps the true research man does not read at all
but takes his input in other ways, orally and socially. On the
whole, one can keep up with a colleague group that has an
effective size of a few hundred members; one cannot possibly
keep up with 10,000.*
However, since all aspects of science grow exponentially
with the remarkable rapidity of a factor of 10 in 50 years, it
seems clear that when a subject has reached the stage where
its first dozen protagonists are beginning to feed on one an­
other’s papers and to watch their priorities and advances, it
can scarcely be expected to remain intact as a field for an­
other generation. When in the course of natural growth it
* One may however scan a group of this size or even larger—using, say,
one of the abstracts journals, in order to find the small group.
IN V ISIB L E CO LLEGES 73
begins sensibly to exceed the few hundred members postulated,
each man will find himself unable to monitor the field properly.
At each stage along the way the backlog of papers can
be packed down into review articles and eventually into text­
books. For example, the progenitor of such a field, looking
back at the end of his working life upon, say, 100 papers of
his own and an effective list equivalent to 100 colleagues,
can muster a bibliography of 10,000 items, duly compressed
into a critical review of the state of the art. But this never
solves the current problem of more than several hundred men
trying to keep up with one another’s work.
One of the traditional modes of expression among such
groups is the founding of a new scientific organ, a journal
which is their medium for communication. A membership of
several hundred may be augmented by a thousand or more
individuals only fractionally or marginally within the group.
Add to this the subscription list of the libraries which decide
that the journal is necessary to them and the usual quota of
miscellaneous subventions, and one has an economic modicum
for such a pubhshing endeavor.
This gives us, incidentally, a check on our ratio of 100.
Since science began, about 10 million scientific papers have
been published, and we are adding to them, with a doubling
in 10 years, or about 6 percent a year, about 600,000 new
papers every year. These come out in some 30,000 current
journals, which therefore each carry an average of 20 per
year. Now 10 million papers implies the existence of about
three million authors, most of whom, because of exponential
growth, are alive now. Therefore, there is approximately one
journal for every 100 authors. Since the seventeenth century,
the besetting sin of all journal creators has been to imagine
that theirs was a journal to end all journals in that particular
 74 IN V IS IB L E CO LLEGES
realm of subject matter.® One doubts whether any group like
the audience of such a journal has remained a closed set be­
yond the appearance of the first issue. Members of the group
invariably read more papers than those prescribed for them
by their colleague editor. Moreover, members of other groups
find that their diet can be improved by reciprocal poaching.
Thus, although there is an average of only 100 scientists to
each journal, nevertheless, it will reach about 1000 scientists
if each man looks at 10 serials.
Such overlapping, as in multiple discovery, generates heat
and lowers efficiency. What is sought is the adiabatic ex­
pansion that could be had if science could be compartmented
into watertight areas, that is, if a man in one area need never
extend his reasearch reading into any other. But evidently
science abhors such splitting. Even the splitting of chemistry
i from physics when the cake of natural philosophy was divided
I gave rise automatically to disciplines of physical chemistry
i and chemical physics, so that each section needed constant
surveillance of the others adjacent. Overlap of research fields
is a sort of embargo that nature exerts against the urge that
man has to divide and conquer.
As might be expected, journals are not shared with 10
men reading each issue or each paper. A now classical paper
by Urquhart^® analyzed the crop during 1956 of 53,000 ex­
ternal loan requests filled by the (central) Science Library
®One might well look into the motivation of such founders. Compare
the story in which two little girls seize control of their fourth-grade dis­
cussion club by a method that they described as “the fair and square
way by which any group takes over any club— capture of the mimeo­
graph machine.”
“ D. J. Urquhart, “ Use of Scientific Periodicals,” International Con­
ference on Scientific Information, National Academy of Sciences-Na-
tional Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1958, pp. 277-90, Tables II,
VII.
IN V ISIB LE COLLEGES 75
in London from its holdings of 9120 different scientific peri­
odicals, of which more than 1300 were not current (Fig. 17).
More than 4800 of the current titles were not used at all during
the year; 2274 were used only once. At the other end of the
scale, the most popular journal had 382 requests, 60 titles
were requested more than 100 times each, and half the re­
quests could be met from the top 40 journals. Less than 10
percent of the available serials were sufficient to meet 80
percent of the demand.
This distribution in rank of journals is equivalent to that
which we have already met in scientific productivity. There
is the same Pareto curve as in the distributions of incomes
or sizes of cities, apparently for much the same reasons. Thus,
journal-dwellers are distributed in the same way as city-
dwellers; there is the same tendency to crystalhze, and the
same balance between the exponential growth of the largest
members and the increasing numbers of the smallest. Since
the dividing line is drawn at the square root of the total
population, we can say that although 30,000 journals exist,
half the reading that is done uses only the 170 most popular
items.
Amount of use seems intuitively to be a better test of
quality than our former criterion, amount of productivity. Un­
fortunately, though we now have figures for the utility of
journals in terms of their rate of usage by a large population,
we have no comparable figures for individual papers. It seems
almost inevitable on qualitative grounds alone that the same
conditions would apply, and that there would be a Pareto-
like distribution linking a hierarchy of most popular papers
at the top end of the scale with a low-ranking group used
twice, or once, or perhaps never.

Fig. 17. UTILIZATION OF JOURNALS ( i .E ., NUMBER OF TIM ES
CONSULTED IN A GIVEN Y E A R ), RANKED IN DECREASING
ORDER OF UTILIZATION
In this study, more than 3000 of the available total of 9120 journals in
the library were not called for at all during the period of investigation.
IN V ISIB L E CO LLEGES 77
From this it would follow that all statements hitherto made
about the numbers of good researchers vis-k-vis poor re­
searchers would apply if we had data for a true count of
quality rather than the admittedly crude count of quantity.
We know that the ranks of individuals would not by any means
correspond on the two scales, but one could say with some
assurance that there would be a significant correlation be­
tween qualitative solidness and quantitative solidness. How­
ever, since it is fortunately not incumbent upon us to provide
such measures for individuals, all we need is the knowledge
that the statistical mechanics of scientific manpower and litera­
ture obey such general laws.^^
It also follows from the existence of these stable and regular
distribution curves that we may now justify on a theoretical
basis our previously empirical procedure of using crude num­
bers of periodicals or papers as an index of the size of science.
We know now that any measure of total number of journals,
papers, or men will give the corresponding number of im­
portant journals, papers, or people. It will be seen that a sHght
change in definition—^for example, uncertainty about the mini­
mum allowable level at which a journal may be accounted
scientific—will only increase the size of the tail. This is why
even the loosest definitions yield usable results and regular
exponential growths.
Having posited that amount of usage provides a reasonable
measure of the scientific importance of a journal or a man’s
work, let us apply this to the scientific paper in general. Let
“ At this point most scientists will express disappointment. I suspect
they have a secret hope that some standard will be found for the ob­
jective judgment of their own caliber and reputation. This craving for
a recognition unsullied by human subjectivity is in itself an interesting
psychological phenomenon.
78 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES
IN V IS IB L E C O L L E G E S 7 9
us consider the use of a paper in terms of the references made
fall off with age. It has been remarked several times that
to it in other papers. We shall have to ignore the evident mal­
if all the references cited in a single issue of a journal, or
practice of some authors in preferentially citing their own
the volume for a certain year, are sorted according to date,
papers, those of their special friends, or those of powerful or
then the number falls off rapidly as one goes back in time.
important scientists that confer status on their work. We shall
Fussier investigated physics and chemistry journals of various
also take a rosy view in supposing that the practice of first
dates and showed that although papers as old as 150 years
writing the paper and then adding for decoration some canon­
had been cited, there was clearly a falling-off with age. Half
ical quota of a dozen references—like Greek pillars on a Wash­
of all references in chemistry were made to papers less than
ington, D.C., building—does not sensibly pervert the average
eight years old, half in physics to papers published in the pre­
conscientiousness in giving credit to papers that have pro­
ceding five years. Unfortunately, the data are badly upset by
vided the foundation for the work.
his use of the war years 1919 and 1946 as half of the sample.
We suppose, then, that a research contribution is built from
A better analysis of the useful half-life of papers can be
a man s own work, from a corpus of common knowledge need­
made from the librarians’ investigations of the amount of use
ing no specific citation, and from an average of 10 other papers
given the various bound volumes of their runs of periodicals
to which reference is made. Take now a field in which since
( Fig. 18). In the greater libraries, among large populations of
the beginning of time a total of N papers has been published.
such journals, it has been found several times that the use falls
If that field is doubling every decade, as healthy fields do, the
off by a factor of two in times on the order of nine years.
next year will produce an additional crop of 0.07 N papers,
The data of Gross and Gross on references made in a single
and these will contain 0.7 N references to the backlog of N
volume (1926) of Chemical Literature, show a halving of the
papers. On an average, then, each of the N papers will be
number for every 15 years of increased age.
cited by new ones at the rate of 0.7 times per year. We have
Although this falling away is striking, remember that the
supposed, however, that the incidence of citation and refer­
actual amount of literature in each field is growing expo-
encing, since these measure the utility of the various papers,
cannot be spread out uniformly. Some papers will be cited See, for example, J. H. Westbrook, “ Identifying significant research,”
Science, 132 (October 28, 1960), 1229-34. Also Paul Weiss, “Knowl­
much more than others. Some may fall unnoticed and never edge, a growth process,” Science, 131 (June 3, 1960), 1716, and the
be cited.^2 clarifying subsequent discussion by S. J. Goffard and C. D. Windle,
Science, 132 ( September 2, 1960), 625.
Let us look first at the way in which citation appears to
“ Herman H. Fussier, “Characteristics of the research literature used
Papers behave rather like a human population, except that it seems by chemists and physicists in the United States,” Library Quarterly, 19
to take a quorum of about 10 papers to produce a new one, rather than (1949), 19-35; 20 (1950), 119-143.
a pair of male and female. We have now shown that childbearing pro­ “ P. L. K. Gross and E. M. Gross, “College libraries and chemical edu­
ceeds at constant rate. cation,” Science, 66 (October 28, 1927), 385-89.

Count from a 1926 volume of a scientific periodical of the distribution
by date of all references cited in that volume. It will be noted that with
the exception of a five-year period embracing World War I, the number
of references falls off by a factor of two in 15 years.
IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES 81
nentially and therefore doubling every 10 to 15 years. There­
fore, to a first approximation, the number of references of a
given date seem to rest in proportion to the total literature
available at that date. Thus, although half the literature cited
will in general be less than a decade old, it is clear that, roughly
speaking, any paper once it is published will have a constant
chance of being used at all subsequent dates.^®
This rather surprising result may be modified in improving
our approximation. In fields tending to honor their pioneers
by eponymic fame—^name laws, name constants, name species
—one may find that good papers actually improve with age,
and their chance of citation increases. In fields embarrassed
by an inundation of literature there will be a tendency to bury
as much of the past as possible and to cite older papers less
often than is their statistical due. This tendency can be seen
in the journal Physical Revieto Letters, which achieves the
greatest possible rapidity of publication. ; .
In these Letters, since their foundation, the half-life of ref­
erences has been stable at about 2 ^ years; that is to say,
half of all references are younger than that. Now, the past
2 ^ years of physics literature contains less than one-third
of all the work published during the last decade, and that
decade, of course, contains half of all that has ever been
printed. The people publishing in these letters are thus en­
abled by rapid publication to deal with less than one-third
of all the papers that would normally be involved. To balance
this, papers in the field must necessarily be cited something
like three times as frequently, and therefore the amount of
overlapping of citations is much increased.
“ In fact a constant rate of citation will ensure that the field increases
with compound interest so that the growth is exponential.
82 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES
Now, papers which make the same citations have an in­
creased likelihood of doing the same work. Thus, increasing
the efficiency of the rate at which one can make priority claims
automatically seems to produce a higher incidence of such
claims, or at least of the raw material for them. There is a
feedback working to minimize part of the advantage gained
by rapid publication.^'^
Let us look next at the way that references and citations
are distributed other than in terms of date. If we were to
rank any population of papers in terms of a hierarchy having
at the top the most-cited paper of the year and at the bottom
those given as a reference only once or not at all, we should
evidently have a Pareto-type distribution similar to that found
for the utility of scientific journals. In terms of this we might,
if we had the information, say that half of all citations were
given to a small group of papers existing at that time. On
purely quahtative grounds one would suppose that 100 papers
out of a field of 10,000 supply about one-third of the citations.
On the other hand there will inevitably be several thousand
papers that are lost, or cited so rarely that they do not be­
come generally known. It is impossible to say how much of
this loss is deserved and just, but a large body of jilted authors
will feel that it is not. There are cautionary tales of redis­
covered papers, hke that of Mendel, to make us feel that the
statistical loss of hterature must be minimized.
Thus, the essential problems of scientific manpower and
” I therefore arrive at the conclusion that a scientific race to get there
first is tremendously wasteful, and that anything that lessens the reward
for such achievement is good. Thus it is perhaps a good thing to deprive
the authors of their chance to get their names on the paper. It might
be made sufficient honor and reward that they are allowed to play with
the team.
IN V IS IB L E CO LLEGES 83
literature are twofold. At the top the critical problem is pre­
dominantly one of human engineering: arranging for the high­
est level people to interact in manageable numbers, seeing
that the great journals continue to correspond to large natural
groups, arranging for the important papers to be collected
and compressed into standard monographs and texts. At the
lower end it is one of switchboard operation: how does one
manage the large body of average scientists and apphers so
that it keeps pace with the leaders; how does one monitor
the lesser journals and the almost unnoticed papers so as to
prevent wastage? We shall see several different mechanisms
at work, each of them presently in a critical condition, as we
make the logistic transition from Little Science to Big Science.
The first noteworthy phenomenon of human engineering is
that new groups of scientists emerge, groups composed of our
maximal 100 colleagues. In the beginning, when no more than
this number existed in a country, they could compose them­
selves as the Royal Society or the American Philosophical So­
ciety. At a later stage, they could spHt into speciahst societies
of this size. Now, even the smallest branches of subject matter
tend to exceed such membership, and the major groups con­
tain tens and hundreds of thousands. In a group of such size,
by our previous analysis, there are likely to be a few groups
of magnitude 100, each containing a set of interacting leaders.
We see now such groups emerging, somewhat bashfully, as
separate entities.
Probably during World War II, pressure of circumstances
forced us to form such knots of men and keep them locked
away in interacting seclusion. We gave them a foretaste of
urgent collaboration in nuclear physics, and again in radar.
These groups are still with us in the few hundred people who
84 IN V ISIB L E CO LLEGES
meet in the “Rochester Conference” for fundamental particles
studies, and in the similar number who congregate by invita­
tion to discuss various aspects of solid state physics.
The organization is not perfect; a few of the best men may
not attend, a few of those who do attend might not qualify
if we had perfect objective judgment. Conscientiously, one
might try not to be too exclusive, not to bar the gentleman
from Baffinland who would be a distinguished researcher on
fundamental particles if only he could. But there is a limit
to the useful size, and, if too many are invited, an unoflBcial
subgroup of really knowledgeable members will be forced into
being.
Such activity is by no means confined to the two groups
mentioned. Similar unoflBcial organizations exist in molecular
biology, in computer theory, in radio astronomy, and doubtless
in all sciences with tens of thousands of participants. By our
theory they are inevitable, and not just a product of the war
or the special character of each discipline. Conferences are
just one symptom; it becomes insuflBcient to meet as a body
every year, and there is a need for a more continuous means
of close contact with the group of a hundred.
And so these groups devise mechanisms for day-to-day com­
munication. There is an elaborate apparatus for sending out
not merely reprints of publications but preprints and pre­
preprints of work in progress and results about to be achieved.^*
The existence of such a group might be diagnosed by check­
ing the preprint list of one man and following this by a check
of the list of each man mentioned. I think one would soon
“ Like government contract research reports, these represent an ob­
noxious (though historically interesting) back-door means of getting pub­
lication for a mass of writing that might be better lost.
IN V IS IB L E CO LLEGES 8 5
find a closed group, a small number of hundreds in member­
ship strength, selected from a population of a large number
of tens of thousands.
In addition to the mailing of preprints, ways and means
are being found for physical juxtaposition of the members.
They seem to have mastered the art of attracting invitations
from centers where they can work along with several members
of the group for a short time. This done, they move on to the
next center and other members. Then they return to home
base, but always their allegiance is to the group rather than
to the institution which supports them, unless it happens to
be a station on such a circuit. For each group there exists a
sort of commuting circuit of institutions, research centers,
and summer schools giving them an opportunity to meet piece­
meal, so that over an interval of a few years everybody who is
anybody has worked with everybody else in the same category.
Such groups constitute an invisible college, in the same
sense as did those first unoflBcial pioneers who later banded
together to found the Royal Society in 1660. In exactly the
same way, they give each man status in the form of approba­
tion from his peers, they confer prestige, and, above all, they
eflFectively solve a communication crisis by reducing a large
group to a small select one of the maximum size that can be
handled by interpersonal relationships. Such groups are to be
encouraged, for they give status pay-oflE without increasing
the papers that would otherwise be written to this end. I
think one must admit.that high-grade scientific commuting
has become an important channel of communication, and that
we must ease its progress.
Possibly, if such groups were made legitimate, recognized,
and given newspaperlike broadsheet journals circulating to a
86 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES
few hundred individuals, this would spoil them, make them
objects of envy or of high-handed administration and formality.
Elite scientific newspapers or broadsheets of this sort have long
existed in Japan, a country faced with the special problem
that many of its top scientists spend appreciable periods in
foreign institutes.
The scientific elite have acquired prestige among the public
in general and the employers in particular, which has given
them a certain affluence and enabled them to commute. It
incidentally replaces the kudos they have lost since the de­
basement of the coinage of scientific publication. Despite a
tendency to place summer schools in pleasant resort areas
whenever possible and to make institute housing a good place
to bring one’s family, there is a further need. There is a further
need to recognize that although a place such as Brookhaven
was once where one went to work with big machines and
certain other facilities, it has come nowadays to play an in­
creasingly important role as a station on the commuting circuit
of several invisible colleges. People come to work with other
people, who have come to work with yet other people, who
happen to be there. We need many more such facilities in
various fields and in various countries. It might, for example,
be wise for the United States government to subsidize the
erection of “Fulbright residential buildings” in London, Cam­
bridge and Oxford, Copenhagen, Geneva, Paris, Delhi, and
wherever else United States scientists habitually commute in
quantity.
So much for the elite, what of the masses? Mention of the
big machines is immediately reminiscent of one way in which
the formation of elites is producing a problem in the organiza­
tion of the rest of the scientific population. It has become com­
IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES 87
mon to organize research, especially big machine work, around
quite a large team of men comprising a few leaders in various
specialties and a large number of younger men. Now it be­
comes the custom to publish as just such a team. As an editor
of Physical Review Letters plaintively noted on a recent oc­
casion, “The participating physicists are not mentioned, not
even in a footnote.”
Surprisingly enough, a detailed examination of the incidence
of collaborative work in science shows that this is a phenom­
enon which has been increasing steadily and ever more rapidly
since the beginning of the century (Fig. 19). It is hard to
find any recent acceleration of the curves that would corre­
spond to the coming of the big machine and indicate this as
a recognizable contributing cause.
Data from Chemical Abstracts show that in 1900 more
than 80 percent of all papers had a single author, and almost
all the rest were pairs, the greater number being those signed
by a professor and his graduate student, though a few are
of the type Pierre and Marie Curie, Cockcroft and Walton,
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.^i since that time the pro­
portion of multi-author papers has accelerated steadily and
“ S. A. Goudsmit, Physical Review Letters, 8 (March 15, 1962), 229.
Another good example of a quite different sort of collaboration is the
appearance of the world’s greatest pseudonymous mathematician, Nico­
las Bourbaki. This Frenchman with a Greek name, author of an inter­
nationally famous collection of treatises on modem higher mathematics,
is actually a group of 10 to 20 mathematicians, most of them French, all
of them highly eminent in their fields, none of them identified by name
as part of the polycephalic Bourbaki. See Paul R. Halmos, “Nicolas
Bourbaki,” Scientific American, 196 (May, 1957), 88-99.
“ Results of an unpublished investigation by L. Badash, Yale Univer­
sity.
“ L. Kowarski, “Team work and individual work in research,” CERN
Courier, 2 ( May, 1962), 4-7.

AS A FUNCTION OF DATE
Data from Chemical Abstracts, 1910-60, are here presented showing the
percentages of papers having a single author, those with two, three, and
four or more. It seems evident that there has been a steadily accelerating
change since the beginning of the century.
IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES 89
powerfully, and it is now so large that if it continues at the
present rate, by 1980 the single-author paper will be e x tin c t .^ ^
It is even more impressive that three-author papers are ac­
celerating more rapidly than two-author, four-author more
rapidly than three-author papers, and so on. At present only
about one paper in four has a multiplicity of three or more
authors, but, if the trend holds, more than half of aU papers
will be in this category by 1980 and we shall move steadily
toward an infinity of authors per paper. It is one of the most
violent transitions that can be measured in recent trends of
scientific manpower and literature.
One way of understanding this movement toward mass col­
laboration is to see it as a natural extension of the growth
created by the constant shift of the Pareto distribution of
scientific productivities. There is a continuous movement to­
ward an increase in the productivity of the most prolific
authors and an increase in the numbers of those minimally
prolific. As we approach a limit in both directions, it is
clear that something has to give. The most prolific people
increase their productivities by being the group leaders of
teams that can accomplish more than they could singly. The
minimal group are in short supply and we can hardly afFord
**Cf. data for Mathematical Reviews and three United States mathe­
matics journals ( percent papers having joint authors):
Math. Revs. Three U.S. journals
1920 2.2
1930 4.1
1940 5.8 18.2
1950 6.5 18.2
1960 10.8 12.7
From a letter by W. R. Utz, American Mathematical Society Notices, 9
(1962), 196-97.
 90 IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES
IN V ISIB L E COLLEGES 91
to let them grow until they reach that ripeness of producing
be effected by the publication of papers. We tend now to com­
significant papers on their own. By the creation of a class
municate person to person instead of paper to paper. In the
of fractional authors—that is, scientists who produce one nth
most active areas we diffuse knowledge through collabora­
part of a scientific paper—a much larger number of the minimal
tion. Through select groups we seek prestige and the recogni­
group is kept at the lower end of the distribution. One expects
tion of ourselves by our peers as approved and worthy col­
that as these individuals grow they will evolve into unit authors
laborating colleagues. We publish for the small group, forcing
or better, but in the meantime the body of research workers
the pace as fast as it will go in a process that will force it
is increased to meet demand. It is to some extent accidental
harder yet. Only secondarily, with the inertia bom of tradi­
that wartime organization and the advent of the big machine
tion, do we publish for the world at large.
have occasioned the introduction of fractionality, without
All this makes for considerable change in the motivation
which we should have a severe manpower shortage.
of the scientist; it alters his emotional attitude toward his
A more optimistic viewpoint to take is that the emergence
work and his fellow scientists. It has made the scientific paper,
of this class of sorcerer s apprentices partly solves the problem
in many ways, an art that is dead or dying. More than this,
of organizing the lower-level scientists so that they can be
the invisible colleges have a built-in automatic feedback mech­
directly related to the research life of the elite. This is nothing
anism that works to increase their strength and power within
but a logical extension of that old familiar principle, the great
science and in relation to social and political forces. Worse,
professor with his entourage of graduate students, the sort
the feedback is such that we stand in danger of losing strength
of thing for which Rutherford or Liebig are well known. The
and efficiency in fields and countries where the commuting
great difference here is that the apex of the triangle is not a
circuit has not yet developed. In short, now that we have
single beloved individual but an invisible college; its locale
achieved a reasonably complete theory of scientific manpower
is not a dusty attic of a teaching laboratory but a mobile
and literature, we must look to the social and political future.
commuting circle of rather expensive institutions. R. E. Weston
et ah have suggested that one might name such teams as the
Dubna Reds and the Harvard M.I.T. Yankees, and give each
player a rating.^®
Because of this, one of the great consequences of the transi­
tion from Little Science to Big Science has been that after
three centuries the role of the scientific paper has drastically
changed. In many ways the modem ease of transportation and
the affluence of the elite scientist have replaced what used to
“ Letter in Physics Today, 15 (June, 1962), 79-80.

(i)
POLITICAL STRATEGY
FOR
BIG S C I E N T I S T S
IN OUR ANALYSIS of the growth of science we have reached a
basic understanding of normal exponential increase and dis­
tribution of talent and productivity. Now let us turn our at­
tention to the abnormal—that is, to those things that do not
follow the pattern. Without doubt, the most abnormal thing
in this age of Big Science is money. The finances of science
seem highly irregular and, since they dominate most of the
social and political implications, our analysis must start here.
If the costliness of science were distributed in the same way
as its productivity or excellence, there would be no problem.
If the per capita cost of supporting scientists were constant,
we should only spend in proportion to their number, so that
the money they cost would double every 10 to 15 years. But
in fact our expenditure, measured in constant dollars, doubles
every 5% years, so that the cost per scientist seems to have
been doubling every 10 years. To put it another way, the cost
! of science has been increasing as the square of the number of
scientists.
Since we know that in general the number of average scien­
tists increases as the square of the number of eminent highly
P O LIT IC A L STRATEGY 93
productive ones, we derive the frightening costly principle
that research expenditure increases as the fourth power of the
number of good scientists. It has already been estimated that
the United States may possess enough talent to multiply the
population of distinguished scientists by a factor of five. Let
us be conservative and envisage a future in which it is only
tripled; we could reach this point quite some time before the
year 2000. By then, according to the principle just derived, our
expenditure would have multiplied by a factor of 81, and
would thus be more than double our entire Gross National
Product.
It seems incontrovertible that such an increase in the cost
of science has been taking place. National research and de­
velopment expenditures were about three billion dollars in
1950 and thirteen billion dollars in 1960—more than a doubling
every five years. The 15 percent annual increase must be
matched against a rise in the Gross National Product of only
3% percent a year. At the present rate, science will be 10 per­
cent of the Gross National Product as early as 1973. It is al­
ready in the region 2 to 3 percent, depending on definition.
Let us be optimistic and suppose that growth of the Gross
National Product will continue, with no manpower shortage
to impede the increase in the number of qualified scientists,
and return to the question of whether the cost per scientist
must also increase. Data from the federal agencies that now
support so much research indicate clearly that the cost per
project has been rising rapidly. The National Institutes of
Health figures for average expenditure per project are $9,649
in 1950 and $18,584 in 1960, almost a doubling.^ Johnson and
^ Dale R. Lindsay and Ernest M. Allen, “Medical research: past sup­
port, future directions,” Science, 134 (December 22, 1961), 2017-24.
 94 P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y
Milton investigated the records of a wide range of research
carried on in industry, universities, and government institu­
tions “ and found that in a decade, although the total costs
increased by a factor of 4 ^ , the output of research and de­
velopment no more than doubled.
Basically it appears that as more and more research is done
our habitual and expected increase therein is still needed but
becomes more diflScult to obtain. The result is that we offer
more and more inducement by raising salaries, providing more
assistance, and giving the researchers better tools for the job.
This is essentially the Fechner law situation already described,
the effect being proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus.
However, apparently it is necessary to use up units of financial
solidness about twice as fast as units of scientific sohdness.
We may now inquire why the cost of research on a per capita
basis and in terms of the Gross National Product seems to have
remained constant throughout history until about World War
II and only since that time has met with the new circumstance
of an increase that keeps pace with the growth of scientific
manpower.
Let me offer as an interpretation, not an answer, the sug­
gestion that this is the cybernetic feedback that is now trying
to decelerate science and bring it to a maximum size. This,
we maintain, is the prime cause of the present logistic rather
than exponential curve. This is the difference between Big
Science and Little Science. But we cannot discover the reason
until we have looked deeper into the world rather than the
national situation, and into the motivation of the scientist.
Let us first examine the world situation, considering aU the
separate countries and the various bodies of science contained
“ Reported editorially in Science, 132 (August 26, 1960), 517.
P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y 95
in them. For a first approximation these are normally dis­
tributed like the sizes of cities within a country, ranking from
the few big ones down to the many small ones. There is uni­
form exponential growth, just as in cities. Just like the rank
list of sizes of cities, as we watch it evolve through history,
the order changes slightly, though the distribution remains
stable. Over the years there is a change in which some coun­
tries alternately lead and lag behind others. It is a slow
process,, though the realization, as in the instance of Sputnik,
can be a shock to the uninformed.
During the present century, world science has altered its
national divisions almost systematically. Consider the figures
showing the contributions of various countries to the produc­
tion of scientific papers analyzed in Chemical Abstracts (Fig.
20). At one end, the old and stable scientific culture of the
British Commonwealth has been sensibly constant, and that
of France has suffered a slight but steady dechne. At the other
end, the U.S.S.R., Japan, and, indeed, all the minor scientific
countries, have spectacularly improved their world position
from about 10 percent at the beginning of the century to
nearly 50 percent now. In the middle, being squeezed by this
expansion, are the two great chemical nations, Germany and
the United States. Their combined share has declined from
60 to 35 percent, with the United States apparently absorbing
a large part of the German share during both World Wars,
and Germany having shrunk to one-fifth of its original size.
Altogether, apart from the wartime winnings from Ger­
many, the United States has approximately maintained its
relative position. It has perhaps even made up the losses of
France. Remember that this does not include the steady ex­
ponential increase at the world rate of a doubling every 10
 P O L IT IC A L STRATEGY 97
years. The spectacular thing is not that the United States or
any other country can maintain this rate and keep its position
constant but that undeniably the U.S.S.R., Japan, and the
minor scientific countries have during the present century
been able to exceed this world rate so that they have grown
from nonentity to a near majority. Together they seem to
have erupted into the scientific scene at a rate exceeding their
normal quota of the scientific explosion by about 6 percent
a year. Consequently, we now face a spectacular dechne in
the traditional ability of big nations to form an absolute ma­
jority of science on their own. They are facing a Pareto-
like distribution of smaller countries whose total bulk will
soon outnumber that of the United States and U.S.S.R.
Japan, the U.S.S.R., and the United States all have present
expenditures in the region of 2 to 3 percent of their Gross
National Products. How is it possible that their relative pro­
ductions can be shifting slowly but steadily? The likeliest ex­
planation seems to be the steady increase in the cost of science,
as society becomes saturated with this activity. A complemen­
tary effect is that it seems cheaper and easier than usual to
make science explode into tlie “vacuum” of an underdeveloped
coimtry.
The present great activity in bringing science and its tech­
nologies to the little nation makes it worth-while for us to
look more closely at the conception and birth of a modern
scientific and technological civilization. We must carefully dis­
tinguish the type of scientific explosion with which we are
concerned, the emergence of a country relative to all others,
from the normal explosive change in which all countries are
involved in proportion to their rank.
Most countries merely retain the same place in the hier­

IN Chemical Abstracts, by c o u n t b ie s , 1910-60

98 P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y
archy, complaining bitterly, like Alice, of being forced to run
so hard to stay in the same place. The recent pronouncements
in England of the Zuckerman Committee on scientific man­
power seem to be like this. When a country decides that it can
afford to let science grow only at the rate of the national eco­
nomic expansion, and that the supply and demand of scien­
tific manpower be allowed to tend to equality, this is tanta­
mount to a suicidal withdrawal from the scientific race. Alas,
it is the race that Britain, bereft of great resources of minerals
or agriculture, should strive in above all else.
Since we seem to have a crystallization of science that
tends to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, how does
it happen that paupers occasionally turn into scientific mil­
lionaires? In one particular instance, history has provided the
complete sequence of steps by which a nation suddenly emer­
gent was able to explode more vigorously than the rest of
the scientific world. An analysis of the data for Japan may
stand as a prototype (Fig. 21).® In 1869, at the beginning of
the Meiji era, ca. 1868, Japan broke with tradition and invited
the introduction of Dutch science, as our Western product was
then called.
Let us now trace the progress of but one science, physics.
The first step was the importation of foreign science teachers
from the United States and Great Britain, and the export of
young Japanese students to foreign universities for advanced
training. The shock wave of Western science hit the country
abruptly and caused Japan’s population of physicists to rise
from 1 to 15 in only six years. By 1880, the shock wave had AS A FUNCTION OF DATE
begun to die away, at first rapidly as the foreigners went home,
The “imported” curve counts Europeans and those trained in Europe.
• I am grateful to Eri Yagi Shizume, Yale University, for allowing me The next curve gives the numbers of their students. The third curve
to make use of her data, to be published in Proceedings XII International gives the number of Japanese students trained at home by Japanese
Congress for the History of Science, Ithaca and Philadelphia, August teachers— this number grows as if it started from the original shock
1962. wave and grew exponentially to the present day, but only after a waiting
period of about 15 years while the first generation was prepared.
 100 P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y
then more slowly as foreign-trained students and teachers re­
tired and died, so that this wave finished by 1918. But in 1880,
when the imported curve was at its maximum, a new wave was
rising rapidly; this was the first generation of Japanese students
trained by the aforementioned foreigners and their disciples.
The first generation of students was a small group; there
were 10 in 1880, and their numbers never rose above 22, reach­
ing a stable balance between training and mortality. Later,
around World War I, they begin to decline noticeably in num­
ber, the last dying in 1928.
The second generation of students, those who were now
being trained by Japanese in Japan, began in 1894 and rose to
60 graduates by 1900. Shortly thereafter growth settled down
to the familiar exponential pattern, doubling every 10 years.
This growth, continued without serious break or disturbance,
led to the state of physics in Japan through the last war.
The total efFect of the shock wave and the pulse of first-
generation students is the inception of exponential growth.
The eventual curve of growth, projected back, acts almost ex­
actly as if it had sprung from the crest of that first shock
wave; that is, as if it had started from 12 physicists in 1881.
Note, though, that growth did not start immediately; there
was a lag of nearly 20 years while the second generation pre­
pared. It seems important that the steady state arose only with
this crop of entirely home-grown physicists. The picture, how­
ever, is not complete. We have omitted the important fact that
primary and secondary education had also to meet similar
crises at similar dates. We have neglected the crucial point
that the greatest diflSculty of all was to decide the language
of instruction. Not until the second generation could it pos­
sibly be in their native tongue, and then not before new vo­
cabularies and new dictionaries had been compiled.
P O L IT IC A L STRATEG Y 101
Simplifications notwithstanding, we now have the basic
time scale and the shapes of the differential equations of sci­
entific manpower in an underdeveloped country, and we have
little reason to doubt that the case is typical. Most important
is the lag while waiting for a generation, then the spurt that
is faster than subsequent exponential growth. It is another
instance of ripe apples falling easily from the tree. The apples
here are not discoveries but potentially bright physicists in a
country that has no physics. This aspect is the opposite extreme
from a highly developed scientific country.
The explosion of science into an underdeveloped country
can, then, if serious effort is made, be much faster than into
one in which science is already established. In the case of the
larger population masses of the world, the process is partly
familiar, and partly a cause for grave concern.
The explosion into a vacuum is basically the reason why
the United States, starting its scientific revolution much later
than Europe, was able to proceed more rapidly to parity and
then to outpacing. In exactly the same way, the U.S.S.R., start­
ing much later than the United States, has been able to expand
at a greater exponential rate—^perhaps a doubling in 7 years
rather than 10. Similarly, now that China is emerging sci­
entifically, as one can tell by the fact that we now routinely
translate their chief journals as we have translated those in
Russian for many years, one may expect it to reach parity
perhaps within the next decade or two. The Chinese scientific
population is doubling about every three years.^
Thus, for the great blocks of the world population we have
* U.S.S.R. 1950 approx. 500 journals
1960 1500
China 1949 0
1959 400
102 P O L IT IC A L STRATEGY
a sort of automatic handicap race. The later a country starts
its determined eflFort to make modern science, the faster it can
grow. One may therefore suppose that at some time during
the next few decades we shall see a rather close finish to a
race that has been running for several centuries. The older sci­
entific countries will necessarily come to their mature state
of saturation, and the newly scientific population masses of
China, India, Africa, and others will arrive almost simultane­
ously at the finishing fine.
I maintain that this process is historically inevitable and
that we must therefore preserve a sense of balance, and not
panic during the forthcoming waves of Sputnik-like scientific
advances by countries previously regarded as second-rate in
high science and technology.
Let us now consider the distribution curve for the incidence
of scientific talent in a country. Although we have no objective
measure for the talent latent in an underdeveloped country,
it is reasonable to assume it would be spaced out in the same
way as in developed countries, with relatively few high talents
and a number of lesser talents increasing more and more as
the minimum qualification is approached. As we have seen,
the general effect of increasing the total scientific population
is to multiply the lesser talents faster than the highest ones
which dominate the scene and produce half of all the sci­
entific advance.
As long as the country is relatively undeveloped, the num­
ber of scientists will be too small to need much crystallization
into groups and elites, for the entire body will consist of the
cream that has risen to the top. As the country develops, crys­
tallization into groups, into scientific cities, begins, as well as
the diminishing relative return of first-class scientists. E f­
P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y 103
fectively, more and more of the extreme tip of the tail of the
distribution curve is used up, so there is a tendency to use up
a longer and longer segment of the tail, to make scientists of
those nearer and nearer to the average ability.
It must be emphasized that we are not saying that there is
any lowering of the minimum standards for being a scientist.
Merely, it seems that the effort to gain more scientists increases
the number at the lower levels at a greater rate than it does
those on the higher levels. Thus, although the number of high­
est caliber men can always be increased, this is done at the
cost of the average standard. From the nature of this process
it follows that at some stage between underdevelopment and
high development one ceases to skim off the cream; society
begins to have to work against the natural distribution of
talents. Apparently it is inevitable that increased inducements
and opportunities result in a smaller and less rich crop, albeit
in enough of an increase in top people to make the process
definitely worth-while for a long time.
It is our thesis that the logistic decline from centuries of
exponential growth takes place because we are scraping the
bottom of the barrel in this way. At a certain point it may
no longer be worth-while to sacrifice so much to increase in­
ducements and opportunities when the only result is a de­
clining over-all standard. It is a difficult thesis to maintain, for
it might well be said that so long as first-class people can be
produced, and so long as those already in being can be en­
abled to continue first-class work, it is always worth-while
to spend the effort and money. This, I think, ignores the gen­
eral mechanics of any approach to logistic stagnation. The
forces of growth, deprived of their customary booty, begin
to apply themselves elsewhere, and a host of new troubles re­
104 P O L IT IC A L STRATEGY
suit. In scientific manpower, if we begin to scrape the bottom
of the barrel, this shows up in several diflFerent ways. Perhaps
the most apparent is an upsetting of the traditional and nat­
ural balance among fields and among countries. The tradi­
tion depended on the natural hierarchy of growths in the
various areas; the new position, instead, largely depends on
the hierarchy of forces associated with logistic decelerations.
In fields of scientific activity where once there was a nat­
ural sorting of people into various subjects according to their
predilections and the caprice of opportunity and inspiration,
society now offers various inducements and facilities designed
to attract men to specific areas. Thus, the law of supply and
demand begins to obey these different forces and the distri­
bution changes just as effectively as if there were only a
constant supply and a rapidly increasing demand. There is, in­
deed, the equivalent of a restricted supply of the highest tal­
ent manpower, so that there is increased competition to secure
a high concentration of such talent in the midst of the de­
creasing density of it.
Thus, in this competitive situation, fields of high induce­
ment gain on the low in a manner deviating from the tradi­
tion. In the United States and in England at present, it is
easy to see such competition between glamor subjects that
get the men, and unglamorous ones that do not. There is an
apparent falling away from the expected growth rates of grad­
uate training in medicine, engineering, and education, which
may be attributed to their maintenance in physics, mathe­
matics, and astronomy.
Similarly, on the international scene, there appears to be a
tendency for scientists to leave the countries where only mini­
mal inducements and opportunities are needed to produce
P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y 105
manpower and move to lands where in order to get the job
done it must be made enormously attractive, notably the
United States. The very internationality of science perhaps
makes such movement more possible for scientists than it is
for other classes of men. Thus, the countries of the British
Commonwealth and Europe complain bitterly of their loss
of high-talent manpower through emigration; and we suffer
the troubles consequent upon a flow from regions of scarcity
to regions of plenty, and upon crystallization of the world’s
supply of the mother liquor of scientific manpower which
causes such manpower to aggregate in already overflowing
centers.®
Exactly the same process takes place among disciplines
as among countries. Let us analyze it further in terms of
the structure we have already found, the formation of small
invisible colleges of a hundred or so men outstanding in each
major field. As such a group develops into an integrated body,
increasing its efficiency and ability to coordinate the activities
of a large number of men and their projects, so the power of
the group seems to increase even more rapidly than its size.
Certainly, as we have seen, its expenses will grow as the
square of the size. Thus, we have a phenomenon of positive
feedback; the more powerful such a group becomes, the more
power it can acquire. Unto him that hath seems to be given,
and this automatically entails the deprivation of him that hath
not.
At heart, the motivation that causes Turkish, Yugoslav,
Canadian, and Brazilian scientists to emigrate to the United
'F o r a masterly and heartfelt analysis of this problem see Stevan
Dedijer, “Why did Daedalus leave?” Science, 133 (June 30, 1961),
2047-52.

106 P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y
States is the same as that which induces potential students
of medicine to try for a Ph.D. in physics. Big Science countries
and Big Science subjects must offer additional inducement in
order to maintain normal growth, and in so doing they tend
to react upon Little Science and little countries.
This is as far as the present mathematical analysis of the
state of science can take us, but it hardly begins to pose the
most significant problems of the age of Big Science. We must
next inquire within the disciplines of sociology and psychology
for the explanation of the peculiar force of inducement and
opportunity within the big processes of science. Having al­
ready noted that the motivation of the scientists and the
role of scientific publication appear to be changed by the
emergence of invisible colleges, we must examine this more
closely.
If there are to be more scientists than just those who fall
from the tree like ripe apples, willing to pursue their dedicated
aim in any circumstances, inducements are necessary. During
the past few decades in the United States and U.S.S.R., and
less so in the rest of the world, there has been a marked in­
crease in the social status of the scientist.® Since he was needed,
since there arose some competition, there was an automatic
raising of general salaries and of the research funds and facil­
ities commanded by the prestige and the cargo cult ^ of mod-
®The increase of status is analyzed in Bentley Glass, “The academic
scientist 1940-1960,” Science, 132 (September 2, 1960), 598-603.
’ The term is used by anthropologists to describe the reactions of
primitive peoples to boatloads of civilization. In the Pacific Isles, in the
last war, when the Navy arrived the native huts were decked with bam­
boo facsimiles of radar antennae, put there so that the new gods would
smile on them and bring riches. [Story told by A. Hunter Dupree, “Public
education for science and technology,” Science, 134 (September 15,
1961) 717.1
P O L IT IC A L STR A TEG Y 107
em science. We do not at present argue about whetber or
not the returns justify the economic, social, or political outlay.
Suffice it to note that each increase in prestige produces an
undoubted pay-off in increased results, but also a heightened
competition that raises the stakes for the next round.
Once we are committed to paying scientists according to
their value or the demand for their services, instead of giving
them, as we give other dedicated groups, merely an oppor­
tunity to survive, there seems no way back. It seems to me
evident that the scientists who receive the just and propei
award of such recognition are not the same sort of scientists
as those who hved under the old regime, in which society
almost dared them to exist.
The matter would not be so worrisome if the only way to
be a scientist was to be endowed with the appropriate talents;
that is to say, if people became radio astronomers not by
capricious circumstances or by drifting into the field, but be­
cause that is what they could do best. From modern studies of
creative ability in the scientific fields it appears that general
and specific types of intelligence have surprisingly little to
do with the incidence of high achievement. At best, a certain
rather high minimum is needed, but once over that hump the
chance of becoming a scientist of high achievement seems al­
most random. One noted quality is a certain gift that we
shall term mavericity, the property of making unusual associa­
tions in ideas, of doing the unexpected. The scientist tends
to be the man who, in doing the word-association test, re­
sponds to ‘black” not with “white” but with “caviar.” Such a
schizoid characteristic is plain throughout the peculiarly eso­
teric scientific humor of Lewis Carroll, and in a thousand
broadsheets and notices of laboratory bulletin boards.
108 P O L IT IC A L STRATEGY
We note, incidentally, that the reaction to this mavericity
is what produces the also characteristic objectivity and con­
servatism of the good scientist, the resistance he exhibits to­
ward discovery and mad associations found by himself and by
others, the feeling that the other man must be wrong.® He is
caught in a violent interaction of passionately free creation
on the one hand and innate objective caution on the other.
According to MacKinnon,® the highly creative scientist might
almost be defined as the rare individual who can survive the
acute tension between the theoretical and the esthetic, the
tightrope walker between truth and beauty. Perhaps it re­
quires an oddly stable schizophrenic trait, one made stable
by becoming a scientist.
Big Science tends to restrain some expressions of mavericit>^
The emergence of collaborative work and invisible colleges,
the very provision of excellent facilities, all work toward spe-
cific goals in research. They seem to exercise pressure to keep
scientific advance directed toward those ends for which the
group or project has been created. This is an old argument
against the planning of research, and it always generates the
response that we must be careful to give each man his head,
to allow him to follow the trail wherever it might lead. But
there is no way to ensure that the man will be motivated to
follow the trail when prestige and status depend on recog­
nition by the group.
When the prestige and status of an individual are sufficient,
‘ Bernard Barber, “ Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery,”
Science, 134 (September 1, 1961), 596-602.
‘ Donald W. MacKinnon, “What makes a person creative?” Saturday
Review, XLV (February 10, 1962), 15-17, 69; “The Nature and Nur­
ture of Creative Talent,” Bingham Lecture, Yale University, April 11,
1962.
P O L IT IC A L STRATEG Y 109
or when for some other reason the whole group can be induced
to follow, it makes a breakthrough, a now familiar type of
phenomenon that carries high additional status with it. Al­
though there is therefore some group encouragement of the
display of mavericity, it might well be that this applies only
in special cases, and that we may now be wasting mavericity
in other directions.^Perhaps there is need for an active effort
to provide a sufficiency of support for research without ob­
jective, funding without project, means for study and status
without obligation to subscribe to a specified goal, the sort
of thing that is at present partially provided in institutes for
advanced study and through high-status research professor­
ships.
Returning now to the question of whether reward by Big
Science produces a breed of scientist different from that of
Little Science, let us look at the characteristics noted by all
those who have sought regularities among groups of eminent
scientists. Galton, one of the first investigators, noted that
more than half of his group of distinguished scientists were
the eldest or the only child in their families, and this propor­
tion, much higher than average, has since been confirmed in
several investigations. Galton noted also that an unusually
high proportion of his subjects were very attached to one
parent, most often the mother. In extension of this it has since
been remarked that many of the great men of science lost
one parent early in youth (before the age of ten) and be­
came strongly attached to the other.^® Case histories show that
scientists often are lonely children who find it easier to re­
late to things than to people. In short, many peculiar charac-
” Newton, Kelvin, Lavoisier, Boyle, Huygens, Count Rumford, Mme.
Curie, and Maxwell are examples.
110 P O L IT IC A L STRATEGY
teristics of personality seem to apply to those who become
scientists.^^
I suggest that all these characteristics apply to people who
became eminent in the days of Little Science, and that we
do not yet have much inkling of whatever new characteristics
have been elicited by the changes to the new conditions of
Big Science. Many of the personality traits found formerly
seem to be consistent with the hypothesis that many scientists
turned to their profession for an emotional gratification that
was otherwise lacking. If this is true, be it only a partial ex­
planation, one can still see how cataclysmic must be the effect
of changing the emotional rewards of the scientific hfe. If
scientists were, on the whole, relatively normal people, just
perhaps more intelligent or even more intelligent in some
special directions, it would not be so diflBcult. But since it ap­
pears that scientists are especially sensitive to their modes of
gratification and to the very personality traits that have made
them become scientists, one must look very carefully at any­
thing that tampers with and changes these systems of reward.
Any such change will make Big Scientists people of different
temperament and personality from those we have become ac­
customed to as traditional among Little Scientists.
The new phase of science seems to have changed the system
of gratification in two different ways. In one direction, we
have introduced the reward of general social status and finan­
cial return where there was precious little before. In the other
direction, we have caused the scientist to seek the approbation
“ Very little reliable work has been published on the psychology of
scientists. The only books known to me are Anne Roe, The Making of a
Scientist (New York, Apollo Editions, Inc., Reprint A-23) and Bernice T.
Eiduson, Scientists: Their Psychological World (New York, Basic Books,
Inc., 1962).
P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y 111
of his peers in a different way. The man of Maxwell’s equa­
tions was something not quite the same as he of the Salk vac­
cine. Though according to the mythology a scientist is sup­
posed to be eternally moved only by innate curiosity about
how things work and what they can do, there is nowadays
a slightly different social mechanism whereby a man is led
to feel his personal inspiration and mavericity acknowledged
among other men as having triumphed over ambient con-
sei-vatism and caution as well as over the secrecy of nature.
If this is true at the highest level, it is also plain that in
less stratified regions the invisible colleges and all lesser groups
confer status and the means of leading a good life. They ex­
ercise power, and, the more power one has in such a group,
the more one can select the best students, tap the biggest
funds, cause the mightiest projects to come into existence.
Such power does not, of course, represent any selfish lust on
the part of the scientist. Society is supporting this structure
and paying for it more and more because the results of his
work are vital for the strength, security, and public welfare
of all. With everything said to be depending on him, from
freedom from mihtary attack to freedom from disease, the
scientist now holds the purse-strings of the entire state.
I hope it is not overdramatic to compare the present posi­
tion of our scientific leadership to that which has existed in
other countries, and in this country at other times, among the
groups that used to control the means of destiny. On occa­
sions, mihtary power has been overriding, and then the gen­
erals have been in control, behind each palace revolt and
cabinet meeting. Elsewhere it has been finance and the con­
trol of capital that were the mainspring of the state and the
implement of decision. Or, in legislative government, one has
112 P O L IT IC A L STRATEGY
seen the vital place taken by men of legal training. In a de­
mocracy we are accustomed to finding the leadership taken
by men emerging from all these fields that have been crucial
to the world s destiny.
Until recently, the scientist, insofar as he played any use­
ful role in matters of state, was a passive instrument to be con­
sulted like a dictionary, to turn out the right answer on de­
mand. Several scientists and nonscientists will believe that
it is desirable to maintain in the face of all difficulty the prop­
osition that the scientist should be “on tap but not on top.”
Without arguing the ethics of the case, one can point out that
the positive feedback governing the power of scientists works
against any such proposition. The increased status of scien­
tists and scientific work makes them increasingly vital to the
state and places the state increasingly in the position of put­
ting technical decisions into technical hands.
However, I am arguing not so much for the assumption of
control by scientists over matters within their technical ex­
pertise but rather that their new tendency to rise to the politi­
cal front as representatives of a group of people who hold the
purse-strings of our civilization is to be encouraged. In a satura­
tion economy of science it is obvious that the proper deploy­
ment of resources becomes much more important than expen­
sive attempts to increase them.
In Great Britain and the United States very few of the
senators, congressmen, members of Parliament, and active
politicians—less than 3 percent, in fact—^have had any train­
ing in science or technology. Among deputies in the Supreme
Council of the U.S.S.R., the figure now exceeds"^ percent,^^
and, though their machinery of government is very different
“ According to a survey by Science Service reported editorially in
Science, 132 (September 30, 1960), 885.
P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y 113
from ours, I take this as an indication of the way our own
future may lie.
In the old days of Little Science there was tremendous re­
action against political action by scientists. They were lone
wolves; they valued their independence; on the whole they
liked things but were not very good at people. Their pay-off
was the approbation of peers, and they were not supposed to
crave any sort of admiration from the man in the street or
any social status within society. Whether they like it or not,
they now have such status and an increasing degree of afflu­
ence. They have, come within the common experience. When
I first saw the comic-strip character of Superman, who had
once looked so much like an all-American football player,
metamorphosing before my very eyes into an all-American
nuclear physicist, I felt that the old game was up, and that
the President-after-next might well be an ex-scientist.
This is the credit side of the register which balances some
of the other, not so good, changes already noticed in the first
generation of new-style Big Science. The scientist is accepted
by society and must shoulder his responsibility to it in a new
way. The rather selfish, free expansion by exponentially in­
creasing private property of scientific discoveries must be
moderated when one is in the logistic state. Racing to get
there before the next man might well be, in the long run, an
impossibly irresponsible action.
It must surely be averred as a matter of principle that the
country that has arrived at a full logistic matinrity, saturated
with science, must try to behave with maturity and wisdom;
must give some guidance to the younger countries that are
growing up around and gradually outstripping it in scientific
superiority.
One of the things I think is happening is the maturing of a
 P O L IT IC A L S T R A T E G Y 115
114 P O L IT IC A L STRA TEG Y
and on the international scene. We need them for the internal
certain responsible attitude among scientists analogous to that
reconstruction of the entire social fabric of science and for
which, in almost prehistoric times, moved physicians toward
the external problems of science in the service of man.
the concept of the Hippocratic Oath. Contrary to popular
It is my hope that in these lectures, beyond my own prides
belief, this happened not because doctors were unusually dedi­
and prejudices in interpreting the data, I have shown that a
cated or public-spirited people but because they were all too
whole series of annoyances and diflSculties in scientific man­
easily held personally responsible by their customers for poi­
power and its literature are part of a single process in which
son, malpractice, and so on. The scientist has had a much
at last we find a change in the state of science the like of’
harder time in arriving at this, for his customer has usually
which we have not seen for 300 years. The new state of
been the state rather than an individual. His guilt has been in
scientific maturity that will burst upon us within the next
the eyes of the world rather than in those of an individual.
few years can make or break our civilization, mature us or
Here I refer not only to such matters as nuclear testing and
destroy us. In the meantime we must strive to be ready with
fallout but also to a general question of what service science
some general understanding of the growth of science, and we
is rendering for the common good and for the improvement
must look for considerable assumption of power by responsi­
of man’s higher understanding. Invisible colleges and groups
ble scientists, responsible within the framework of democratic
now have the power to cast out their “poisoners and abor­
control and knowing better how to set their house in order
tionists,” and withdraw from them the old protective cloak of
than any other men at any other time.
disinterestedness that was proper in the days of Little Science.
It is most heartening to find that on the whole, sundry much-
publicized examples notwithstanding, the world body of sci­
entists has been remarkably unanimous in political evalua­
tions during recent years, and consistent in pubHc action in
an age of Big Science. Robert Gilpin’s recent analysis of
this consistency makes a most hopeful document.
Scientists have hardly yet begun to realize that they hold
in their own hands a great deal of power that they have hardly
used. The ranks of senior scientists and key administrators of
science have now swelled to the point where I think it will
not be long before some of the good ones begin to enter politics
rather more forcibly. We need such men, on the national scene
“ Robert Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1962).

INDEX
Aaboe, Asger, xi
Abstract journals, 9,10,18, 72
Accademia del Cimento, 63n
Accelerators, 4,18, 27n, 28, 29
Africa, 102
Allen, Ernest M., 93n
American Men of Science, 36-38,
54
American Philosophical Society, 83
Archimedes, 16
Army General Classification Test,
39, 50-53
Babbage, Charles, 15
Badash, Lawrence, 87n
Barber, Bernard, 63, 6 6 ,108n
Beanstalk, growth, 22
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 69
Belgium, 60
Big Science, 2, 3, 4, 18
Blewett, J. P., xi, 27n, 28
Bourbaki, Nicolas, 87n
Bowditch, Nathaniel, 15
Boyle, Robert, 16, 109n
Brahe, Tycho, 4
Brookhaven laboratories, 18, 27n,
86
Cairo, 27n
Cambridge Mathematical Tripos,
50n
Cape Canaveral, 3 ,18
Carroll, Lewis, 107
Cattell, J. McKeen, 36, 37
Cayley, Arthur, 49
Chemical Abstracts, 42-44, 47, 87,
88, 95, 96
Chemical elements, 29, 30
China, 101,102
Cities, g r o ^ ^ of, 57, 58, 75, 95
Cockcroft, Sir John, 87
Copernicus, Nicholas, 69
Crystallization, 56, 57, 75, 98, 102,
105
Curie, 8 7 ,109n
Cybernetics, 24, 94
Darwin, Erasmus, 33, 34
Davy, Sir Humphrey, 15, 29, 30
Deceleration, 21-30, 94, 104
Dedijer, Stevan, 105n
Dennis, Wayne, 41, 48
Deutsch, Karl W., 69n
Doubling times, 6-8, 10, 11, 13, 14,
20, 23, 27, 37-39, 46, 73, 78, 81,
92, 93, 95, 100, 101
Dupree, A. Hunter, 106n
Econometrics, 55
Eiduson, Bernice, llOn
Einstein, Albert, 2, 40
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 41
English Men of Science, 34-36
Eponymic immortality, 16, 81
Escalation, 24, 25, 27-31
Eugenic Society, 33
IN D E X
Expenditure on science, vii, viii, 2,
17, 19, 31, 38, 59, 92-94, 97,
103, 105-7, 111, 112
Exponential growth, 5-12, 14, 16-
30, 35, 37-39, 55-57, 59, 61, 62,
72, 75, 77, 81n, 92, 94, 99-104,
113; see also Deceleration
Fechner’s law, 50, 51, 55, 94
Fermi, Enrico, 27, 69
Fingerprinting, 33
France, 60, 95, 96
Franklin, Benjamin, 16
Fulbright FeUowship, 86
Fussier, Herman H., 79n
Galileo, 16, 68
Galton, Francis, 33-38, 50n, 54, 66,
109
Gaussian distribution, 43, 49
Genetics, 33, 34
Germany, 60, 95, 96
Gilpin, Robert, 114
Goffard, S. J., 79n
Goudsmit, S. A., 87n
Graubard, S. R., In
Gross, E. M., 79
Gross, P. L. K., 79
Halmos, Paul R., 87n
Hardware of science, 2, 4, 16, 30,
86, 87, 90
Harmon, Lindsay R., 51, 52
Hereditary Genius, 34-36
Hippocratic Oath, 114
Holland, 4
Holmes and Watson, 87
Holton, Gerald, In, 25
Hooke, Robert, 68
Hunting, cybernetic phenomenon,
24, 25, 31
Huygens, Christian, 109n
Hven, 4
Immediacy of science, 1, 2, 8, 11,
13-16
India, 4, 102
117
Inverse-square law, 42, 43, 46, 48
Invisible colleges, 85, 90, 91, 105,
106, 108, 111, 114
Italy, 60
ai Singh, 4
apan, 86, 95-100
dhnson, 93
Journal des Sgavans, 15
Journals, scientific, viii, 8, 9, 15,
17, 31, 38-40, 43, 52, 59, 60,
64, 65, 70, 71, 73-80, 82, 83,
85, 89, 106, 115
Kelvin, Lord, 109n
Kepler, Johannes, 68
Khaos, ix
Klein, David, xi
Kowarski, L., 87n
Kronick, David, 15n
Kuhn, Thomas S., 66
Lasky, S. G., 25n, 26
Lavoisier, Antoine, 109n
Library of Congress, 59
Liebig, Justus von, 90
Lindsay, Dale R., 93n
Livingston, M. S., xi, 27n, 28
Logistic growth, 20-31, 35, 37, 38,
55, 57, 61, 83, 94, 103, 104, 113
Lotka’s law, 42-48
MacKinnon, Donald W., 108
Manhattan Project, 3 ,1 8
Manpower in science, viii, 8, 12,
16, 17, 19, 31, 38, 54, 56, 77, 82,
89-91, 94, 98, 101, 104, 105, 115
Mathematical Reviews, 89n
Mavericity, 107-9, 111
Maxwell, James Clerk, 16, 109n,
111
Meiji era, 98
Mendel, Gregor, 34, 82
Merton, Robert, 65-68
Michelangelo, 69
Milton, 94
Motivation of scientists, 16, 82n,
91, 94, 105-11
118
Multiple authorship, 88, 89
Multiple discovery, 65-70, 74
National Academy of Sciences, 41,
47
National Institutes of Health, 93
Newton, Sir Isaac, 2, 16, 64, 109n
Nobel Prize, 39, 56n
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 16
Papers, scientific, 8, 15, 17, 35, 38-
59, 62-65, 68-91, 95, 96
Pareto’s law, 49, 51, 55, 57, 61, 75,
82, 89, 97
Pearson, Karl, 34n
Petty, Sir William, 33
Phihsophical Transactions of the
Royal Society, 15, 42-44, 47, 63,
64
Physical Review Letters, 81, 87
Planck, Max, 16
Poisson distribution, 43, 67
Prepreprints, 84
Preprints, 72, 84, 85
Price, Derek J. de Sofia, 8, 9, 18
Priority, 65-70, 73, 82
References, 65, 72, 78-82
Reif, F., 69
Reprints, 71, 72, 84
Rich, Bamaby, 63
Riemann, F., 41
Rochester Conference, 84
Roe, Anne, llOn
Royal Society, 15, 35, 41-44, 47,
63, 64, 83, 85
Royal Society Bibliography of Sci­
entific Literature 1800-^1900, 41
Rumford, Count, 109n
Rutherford, Lord, 90
Sa^ li, 63n
Sal : vaccine. 111
IN D E X
Samarkand, 4
Saturation, 21-32, 35, 54, 55, 97,
102, 112,113
Scholia, 65
Science Library of London, 75
Scotland Yard, 33
Shiziune, Eri Yagi, 98n
Shockley, William, 50n
Simon, Herbert A., 43
Societies, scientific, 8, 39, 63
Sputnik, 18, 95
Superman, 113
Thermodynamics, viii, ix
Transits of Venus, 4
Thompson, D’Arcy W., 22
Ulugh Beg, 4
United Kingdom, 37, 60, 95, 96,
98, 104, 105, 112
United States, 8, 19, 37, 54, 58-60,
89, 95-98, 101, 104-6, 112, 113
U.S.S.R., 54, 60, 95-97, 101, 106,
112
Universities founded, 25, 2T
Urqhart, D. J., 74
Utz, W. R., 89n
Visher, S. S., 36n
Walton, Ernest, 87
Wars, their effect upon science, 17-
19, 61, 80, 83, 84, 90, 94, 95,
100 ^
Weber’s law, 50
Weinberg, Alvin M., 2n
Weiss, Paul, 79n
Westbrook, J. H., 79n
Weston, R. E., 90
Windle, C. D., 79n
Womanpower, 54
Zipf, G. K., xi, 51, 57, 58
Zuckerman Committee, 98